re: #70 Fozzie Bear

This is a centuries-old schism between a cosmology based on divine authority and one based on natural laws.

This isn’t about political parties. It’s about religion. It’s about fundamental ideas about how the world works. Either every effect has a physical cause or causes, or this is all the will of God. You really can’t have it both ways.

I have never bought the fiction that religion and science are compatible. They aren’t, and never have been. The best we have yet achieved is an uneasy balance between areas of knowledge that fall under one domain, and areas that fall under the other. It isn’t working, because people that believe in a GOD will never accept that there is are types of knowledge which religious fervor can not touch.

If you believe in magic, or people rising from the dead, or prophets, you are much more likely to believe things that conflict with available evidence, because you have trained yourself to believe that the world is lying to you, in order to suppress cognitive dissonance. It is not a coincidence that the political party that is vastly more religious is also the one that contains people who are far more likely to believe insane theories.

I realize this isn’t a popular sentiment, and people will think I am attacking them, but i’m not. This is the elephant in the room, and everybody avoids talking about it because they have fooled themselves into thinking that the endless struggles between rule of men and rule of law are somehow resolved. We do not live in exceptional times, we only have exceptional technology.

We aren’t any smarter than we were 10,000 years ago, as a species.

I think you are on to something, but I will say that I do not think it’s that faith and science cannot coexist, but that certain interpretations of faith have convinced themselves that science is dangerous to them, as they associate it with other things they also reject.

(Like the Enlightenment, she mutters.) It’s a rejection of the modern world. Sort of. These folks are not going off to be Amish, they want to live in the world that science and the Enlightenment have made, but they also want to be able to impose their own theocratic social order on it. This won’t work, but they don’t care.

I dunno. I manage to be religious and to approve thoroughly of science. I don’t feel attacked, I just wonder where I fit into this theory.