Is Science a Religion?

Welcome to EvC, OpenMInd.Here is how Wikipedia defines religion: It also adds: This all seems like a reasonable description to me. So how does this science fit into this definition of religion?

---

But government...is not simply the way we express ourselves collectively but also often the only way we preserve our freedom from private power and its incursions. -- Bill Moyers (quoting John Schwarz)

quote:

---

Many of the people on this board seem to misunderstand religion, and seem to have overlooked my point.

---

I think it is you who misunderstand religion and so your point isn't valid.-

quote:

---

Religion seeks to explain the universe.

---

No, if religion seeks to explain anything it is to explain where a person's place is in society and to provide guidelines on how to live as a member of the society. It might do this with a mythological structure and a cosmology, but it also uses a set of shared ritual to reinforce these explanations.-

quote:

---

The reason why people become part of a religion is because they truly believe that the religion has a sound explanation for the mystery of this universe.

---

No, people become part of a religion because they were raised in it, or because they become part of a new society and wish to take part in it. It is the totalitarian nature of the Abrahamic religions that lead people in the West to mistake the nature of religion.-

quote:

---

People all have questions like: Why does the world exist? Who made it? Who controls it? What keeps everything going? What happens after death?

---

And many religions do not answer these questions and do not try to answer these questions. So clearly the purpose of religion cannot be to provide answers to these questions.The reason you think these questions are important is because the particular religion you were raise in (or exposed to during your life) used questions like these to structure its mythologies, cosmology, and rituals.-

quote:

---

Science can therefore be considered a religion that believes in a strictly physical world and one that hides nothing from the five senses.

---

Science does not "believe" this; the methodology of science simply limits it to what can be observed with the five senses. And this doesn't have anything to do with religion anyway.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

Please give the responses your serious consideration....

---

Indeed, I am getting a lot of "food for thought" from the various responses.-

quote:

---

The scientific method is not a religion any more than Robert's Rules of Order is a Bible.

---

I like this analogy, by the way. I may use it myself.-Carry on.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

Whatever is your opinion of the universe, whether you believe in the supernatural or you just believe in pure science, you have just made a religious opinion.

---

Except that science is not something one believes in. Science is an activity with a certain set of rules, and most people believe that in some situations this activity produces reliable information about the world in which we live. It is like saying that, since I understand the rules of chess, I can predict that I will put my opponent in check mate in four more moves. This is not a religious statement, nor is chess a religion (although I suppose it could be for some people).It is the same with science. I have an understanding of how science operates, and so when a scientists tells me that Io is covered with sufur volcanoes I have some trust that what she says is accurate. That is not a religious statement.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

The theory says that all bodies that contain a mass will attract other bodies.

---

Sure. But this is a tentative statement. The theory says that all bodies that have mass will attract other bodies according to the given equation. But scientists will then say that so far they have not seen an exception to the theory. Or they will say that there are some exceptions, and they are working on how to resolve these exceptions.Theories are artificial constructs and acknowledged as such. They are proposed as ways of describing the behavior of phenomena, and then it is checked whether the phenomena actually behave in the described manner. If they do, then we tentatively say that the theory appears to describe the universe accurately. And we will continue to say this until we observe exceptions to the theory.-

quote:

---

Where is there a proof for this concept?

---

Of course not. But who cares? No one is claiming that the theory is definitely "true". All anyone is really claiming is that as far as we know, and as far as we have seen to date, is that the theory describes the behavior of phenomena reasonably well.-

quote:

---

Do you really "believe" that anything with mass has an attractive force?

---

I recognize that there seems to be a certain regularity in the universe, and that modelling an attractive force due to mass gives reasonably accurate predictions as to what I may expect in most experiments.-

quote:

---

Maybe there is another "explanation" for this phenomenon.

---

Actually, there is. Newton described the attraction of gravity as an intrinsic attractive force due to mass. Einstein described gravity as a curvature of space-time which causes geodesics in a Lorentzian 4-manifold to deviate from the path we would otherwise expect in 3 space and 1 time dimensional space.And we already know that Einstein might be "wrong". It is possible that a reconciliation of General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics will result in a mathematical model that will drastically change the conceptions in which we look at GR.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

For some reason spirits are not scientific but an unknown "force" is.

---

These are not the same thing. The "force of gravity" is not the "cause" of two objects coming close to one another. "Force of gravity" is the description that two things are approaching one another.When something is moving off of a straight-line path, we say that there is a force. This is not saying, "the force is causing the object to move off of its straight-line path." Rather, saying, "there is a force" is just another way of saying, "the object is moving off of a straight-line path.""Gravity" is not the "cause" of the "force", either. Rather, saying, "the force of gravity" is just another way of saying that the object is not moving along a straight-line path, that this phenomenon is occurring under a certain set of circumstances, and that we should be able to do a certain type of calculation to determine just how it is going to move.Now, one can wonder what "causes" the "force of gravity". You could, if you want, say that it is due to little spirits. Or you could say that it is a manifestation of curved geodesics in a Lorentzian space-time. Or you could, like Newton, just say that as far as we know that is just the way things are, that we don't know what causes the force of gravity.So, saying, "People are sticking to the floor because of gravity" is not telling you what is causing people to stick to the floor. Rather, someone is just pointing out that people are, in fact, sticking to the floor and that they know how to do some calculations that will tell you how much they are sticking.By the way, I wouldn't label a theory of little spirits necessarily religious.Edited by Chiroptera, : Changed subtitle.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

How does this supernatural being control the world which is completely governed by natural laws?

---

You still don't understand what science is, Open MInd. The world is not governed by "natural laws", nor does science say any such thing. What we call "natural laws" are descriptions of how the universe behaves as far as we have observed so far. We already acknowledge that we may observe phenomena that will behave differently than we expect, that will "violate natural law". In that case, science will admit that the previous description of the universe was wrong and try to come up with a new description that will take into account the new phenomenon.-

quote:

---

? What if you threw your pen to the floor and this supernatural being did not wish it to fall? Using scientific principles, how can this task be accomplished.

---

I would suppose that a supernatural being would not use scientific principles to accomplish this.-

quote:

---

Scientific principles would never allow for any supernatural being to ever take control of the natural course of events.

---

How would "scientific principles" prevent a supernatural being from "taking control" of the natural course of events?-

quote:

---

Therefore, science does not fit in with any religion and it must be its own religion.

---

Come to think of it, you don't seem to understand what "religion" is, either. So far, even your incorrect descriptions of science do not fit into the definition of religion.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

If you are correct in your description of gravity, I would agree that it is not in anyway a religious concept.

---

And I will repeat that your example of "little spirits" is also not a religious concept.-

quote:

---

Rather, they say that anything of mass will have a built in attractive force.

---

Objects attract each other. Some objects attract each other more than others. Those to which other bodies are attracted more strongly are said to have more mass. Mass is simply a description of how much other bodies are attracted to each other.Force is simply the fact that bodies will move together. Mass is just the fact that some bodies will move together more strongly than others.-

quote:

---

They attribute the force to the mass of the object and reject the possibility of any outside force.

---

"Outside forces" make no sense in this context. There is only a force without any regard as to "where" it comes from or what "causes" it. And force is just the acknowledgment that bodies will move together.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

Hi, kuresu.

quote:

---

mass is simply a measurement of how much "stuff" there is in an object.

---

This is a popular characterization, but it's only true for macroscopic bodies, and only by accident. It turns out that every single electron has the same mass, every single up quark has the same mass, and every single down quark has the same mass. Since every familiar object is made of electrons, up quarks, and down quarks, then an objects mass is a measure of how many electrons and quarks it contains (ignoring the binding energy, which throws things off a bit).However, when we examine the quarks and electrons themselves, it becomes problematic to talk about "how much 'stuff'" they contain. As far as we know, they are all "point particles", and under other theories they are even stranger things still. Even though an up quark is much more massive than an electron, it becomes a bit strange to say that an up quark containts "more 'stuff'" than an electron.-Here is the correct physics description of mass.There are actually two kinds of mass.Inertial mass (which you are talking about) is a measure of how hard it is to move an object, or to get it to move off of it's straight-line path if it is moving. If you apply the same force to object A and to object B, and if object A accelerates twice as much as object B, then it turns out that whenever you apply the same force to both A and B, you will see that A will always accelerate twice as fast as B. We then say that B has twice the inertial mass as A.Gravitational mass (which is what Open MInd and I were discussing) is like electric charge; it is the "charge" that describes how much gravitational attraction is associated with a body. If object B exerts twice the gravitational force on C than A does, then it turns out that B will exert twice the gravitational force on all bodies than A will. We therefore say that B has twice the gravitational mass that A has.Newton discovered that inertial mass is always proportional to gravitational mass. That is, if B has twice the inertial mass of A, then we will automatically know that B also has twice the gravitational mass of A. So, since the force laws have an arbitrary constant in them (which must be measured empirically, and depends on the system of units), we might as well choose the system of units so that the inertial mass and the gravitational mass are the same. This is artificial; gravitational mass and inertial mass are different, but because in any body they are always proportional, we just use the same units on them.Except that in General Relativity we find out why this proportionality exists. They turn out to be the same thing after all. Gravitational attraction is just a manifestation of bodies moving along geodesics (the analog of "straight-line paths" in Euclidean space), and trying to keep objects from moving together is exactly like trying to get bodies to move off of their straight-line path, and so we are measuring their inertial mass after all.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

You know, when you start wasting time arguing about the analogy, it means that the analogy isn't making the point you want and you should probably move on.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

As your father used to say, "I don't care who started it!"

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

Scientist started to seek out pattern in the world and explain how everything is related and united. This stemmed from the monotheistic principles and is in no way an obvious assumption (consider the Greeks).

---

The source of an idea does not make the idea religious. "Seeking a pattern in the world" is not itself a religious idea.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

The scientist "believe" in unity of the universe.

---

Do they? I don't even know what this means.-

quote:

---

If science is purely factual based, why do scientist search for a TOE when there is no facts that support a TOE?

---

TOE? Do you mean the development of a mathematical model from which all the known forces of physics can be derived? How is this a religious concept?

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

quote:

---

Science describes the "force" that holds one to the floor as the same force that keeps planet Earth revolving around the Sun. Scientist put forward this idea because they did believe in a random and chaotic universe.

---

Actually, Newton put forward this notion because he noted that if
F=GMm/r² then he could accurately describe both the phenomena of objects falling to the earth and planets orbiting the sun.What is more, F=GMm/r² also accurately described the orbits of the subsequently discovered moons of Jupiter.I'm not sure why you think that a mathematical formula that has been verified through many different observations counts as a "religious" belief.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely

Someone had already made the observation that a ball shot out of a cannon follows a curved trajectory; the shape of the earth is curved; and so it is possible that if a ball is shot out of a cannon with enough force it will "fall" in such a way that it will follow the curvature of the earth; in other words, it will orbit the earth.That may have clued Newton to try using a central force to model the orbits of the planets and to postulate that this was the same phenomena as apples simply dropping to the ground.At any rate, the subject is whether or not science is a religion. You are doing a pretty poor job at explaining why we should consider science to be a religion, undoubtably because you don't have a very clear idea of what religion is.It doesn't matter whether Newton had a prior idea of a unity of the forces; such an idea is not necessarily a religious idea.It doesn't matter if Newton did reach this conclusions due to his religious beliefs; that doesn't make the idea of some unifying principle a religious idea.Just what do you think a religion is? You seem to believe that a religion is just some set of beliefs that claims to provide answers to some sorts of questions, which is a pretty unsophisticated and uninteresting notion of a religion.

---

This world can take my money and time/ But it sure can't take my soul. -- Joe Ely