| nuckles87 said: <
I'll quote this one to make sure it doesn't get lost. But yeah, the above gets to the heart of things way more succintly than I will...but I'll answer anyway: If I were to rely purely on my own experience for my knowledge of the universe, I would be a woefully ignorant person. I am an agnostic Jew. Beyond some cursory knowledge of my own people's history, I know very little about any religion. I have never seriously studied a science. I have never seriously studied a math. So I'm not entirely sure what your point is here. Should I just accept that I know nothing about the world around me, save for my own experiences? I TRUST (belief is not the right word, as science is not a religion) in science because I am surrounded by it. Everything I use is built on scientific principles I only have a basic understanding of. I trust in science because science is peer reviewed by thousands of people, each and every one of them with a reason to prove everyone else wrong with some data point or piece of evidence that all of their colleagues have missed. Religion can have some vigorous philosophical discussions, but there is no discussion of data. There is no peer review. There is no evidence beyond some ancient (and not so ancient) books that tell fantastical, almost entirely unverifiable stories. So no, it is VERY different from a priest quoting a Bible. Certainly, a religious figure can provide some unique insight and ideas based on existing religious work. But you'll never have a rabbi try to prove Kabbalah by pointing to a newly discovered piece of data. But you can have a scientist sequence human DNA and discover that some of us have a bit of neanderthal in us from crossbreeding.
Yeah, I agree with you on the Big Bang. Certainly, we may never know what happened before the big bang, or what caused it. We can hypothesize a "big bounce" or just stick God in there. But my point was that we have constantly been expanding our knowledge beyond what we thought was possible through our own narrow world views, that we naturally have as tiny organisms on a tiny world. Who knows what technology may nor may not reveal to us in the next 10,000 years.
I won't presume to talk about Newton's humility, nor will I presume to talk about the arrogance of modern day scientists. Newton may have been wrong about a lot, but he helped set the foundation for our understanding of the modern world.
As I noted earlier, I'm an agnostic jew. The "jew" part refers to my ethnicity and heritage, while the "agnostic" part refers to my faith, or lackthereof. I think there is a possibility of the existence of "A" God. I will not say with certainty that a creator(s) does not exist. I doubt the existence of a human-created Gods, largely due to my understanding of man's theological past. I don't see any particular God that is worshipped today as anything special or wholly different from the myriad of extinct theologies that our current Gods replaced. It seems ridiculous to me that any modern is any more likely to be real than any dead God, and that man can really know a higher being that would seem to exist beyond our plane of existence. But this has nothing to do with my trust in science. This is just my own, personal philosophy. |
I believe I replied to most of it in the other post, you both have a similar opinion. About how and why (or who), please refers to Newton.
