Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Science vs Religion: The Needless War.

People who have actually read some of my work may find me repeating myself on certain topics, but thats only because I can't remember where i put every little concept.

So here's some crap that may or may not be new.

Basically my point here is that while religion discovered early the power of hiding facts, science kind of stepped over it in smug oblivity. - And yes, I'm aware thats 'not a word', yet. don't complain, you're lucky I even attempt to use your spelling. -

Like most of the horrors of religion, I don't think it's so much a willful thing as tradition and stagnation of psychological inertia. But the end result is the same, the modern scientific community has way too much in common with the early church.

Here's what I had to say in my essay "The Lab Coat Effect"

It's a startling fact that science today has many similarities with the early church. Allow me to elaborate. Let’s compare a modern day orthodox scientist and a priest of the early church. They both have a body of text that is incomprehensible to the layman, both texts are unreadable without special linguistic training, both profess to understand what's in that body of text better than the layman could, both profess that the text is extremely important and reveals the nature of reality to one degree or another, both throw up barriers to the acquisition or translation of the text for lay examination, both are caustic of any work not approved by their orthodox ruling bodies and councils, and perhaps most importantly people take their word on things because of title without having to see evidence, seeing a pattern here?

Using Latin and lingo in an era of instant translation is simply to keep the layman out more than anything.

One reason for this similarity is deceptively simple. Science is beginning to try and answer religion's question, and vice versa.

Science answers how, and religion answers why. If someone can give me an example of "how" and "why" being asked about the same thing and both giving the same answer, I really wanna hear it.

The two should never overlap. But they are both fundamentally important. the problem is merely execution. They recognize each others power and are baffled by each other, and thus they fear each other. And if there is anything we primates know about it's fear. I really think that this is pretty much what he was talking about when he said...
Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
The only time they fight is when they act on that insecurity and invade each others turf thinking they'll get an advantage, this is pretty well the main source of war. Religion should not try to answer how creation happened, because then you get retarded stuff like humans riding dinosaurs and a time traveling Satan. Nor should science try to tell you why you are here, you get nonsensical answers like "because e=mc^2".

If they could just grasp that How and Why are both necessary, and stick to each side there would be no need to fight. And in fact maybe they could help each other. I'll add more to this later I think.

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