religious views with Aristotle's philosophical approach. Whereas much of Aristotle's work was based on empirical observations of the physical, biological, and social worlds, medieval discussions of Aristotle tended to treat his writings as a kind of sacred text almost as venerable as the Bible or Koran. Veneration of texts was challenged by the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After the Royal Society of London was formed in 1660, its motto became “Nullius in verba,” Latin for “nothing in words.” This phrase expressed the determination to base conclusions on experimental methods such as those used by founding members Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. Such methods contrasted starkly with reliance on sacred religious and philosophical texts, although many scientists, like Isaac Newton, remained religious. In the eighteenth century, however, the conflict between science and religion became explicit in the writings of philosophers such as Voltaire and David Hume. Today, most leading scientists are atheists or agnostics, either denying the existence of God or expressing doubts about it. At the other extreme, religious fundamentalists in both the Christian and Islamic traditions reject science as propounding views that are not just false but also evil. Some thinkers today attempt to reconcile science and religion, either by loosening religious doctrines in ways that make them compatible with scientific findings, or by delegating different areas of responsibility to science and religion. For example, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that science and religion occupy separate areas of concern, with science having responsibility for empirical matters such as whether evolution occurred, but with religion remaining autonomous and paramount for questions of morality and meaning. My view is that even morality and meaning are better approached via scientific evidence than by religious faith. Let us now look at the difference between faith-based and evidence-based thinking.
How Faith Works According to the Website adherents.com, 84 percent of the more than 6 billion people in the world today support some religious group. The largest religions are Christianity, with 2.1 billion members in various denominations, and Islam, with around 1.5 billion. Both of these religions believe in just one god, unlike the third largest religion, Hinduism. And both have central texts, the New and Old Testament Bible for Christians, and the Koran for Muslims. They also have historically important religious leaders, such as St. Paul for Christians and Muhammad for Muslims, as well as contemporary leaders such as the pope and cardinals for Catholics and ayatollahs for Shiite Muslims. Christianity and Islam both have subgroups, with many different kinds of Protestants opposed to Catholics, and Sunni Muslims often in conflict with Shiites over doctrines and practices. Religious faith is a belief in, trust in, and devotion to gods, leaders, or texts, independent of evidence. For example, Catholics believe in God and saints such as Mary the mother of Jesus, and they also trust the pope and the Bible as sources that reveal the word of God. A belief is faith based if the source of its acceptance is supposed communication from a deity, leader, or text. If you are religious and have a moral dilemma about whether to lie to a friend, you can pray to God, consult a religious leader such as a priest, or read a religious text such as the Bible. Your aim is to get a faithbased answer that will tell you what you are morally obliged to do. Faith can also propose answers to factual questions, such as the age of the universe: fundamentalist Christians consult the Old Testament and their ministers and conclude that the universe began around six thousand years ago, in contrast to the fourteen billion or so years that scientific evidence suggests. Religious faith is enormously important to the lives of billions of people, but it faces three serious problems as a means of deciding what to believe or what to do: variations among
religions, falsity of religious beliefs, and evil actions based on religion. The first problem is that religions vary greatly in what gods, leaders, and texts they propose to believe in, and faith provides no basis for choosing among them. Should you have faith in the single Christian God, or in the dozens of Hindu gods such as Shiva? Who is a better guide to life, St. Paul or Muhammad? Should you listen to the Catholic pope or to a Protestant minister? Should you seek wisdom in the Bible, the Koran, or the Book of Mormon? There are major disagreements within and across various religions, and faith provides no way of settling such disagreements other than simply shouting that your faith is better than the others. Religious faiths cannot all be right, but they can all be wrong. For most people, the religious faith that they acquire is an accident of birth. Consider two prominent examples, former American president George W Bush and Arab leader Osama bin Laden. Many of Bush's beliefs and decisions are based on his religious faith, which derives from his Christian Protestant background. He became more deeply religious in his early forties, giving up drinking and undertaking serious study of the Bible. Osama bin Laden has a very different set of beliefs and values, but they are also heavily faith based, deriving from his Muslim upbringing and subsequent study. Obviously, there are many Christians who do not share Bush's attitudes, and many Muslims who do not share bin Laden's, so religion is not the only determinant of their beliefs. But it is equally obvious that the particular faith that most people acquire is the result of their family circumstances. From a child's point of view, acquiring the parents' religious views makes sense, as the parents are the source of many kinds of reliable information. Once children are exposed to particular religions, their doctrines can become highly coherent with their other beliefs and personal goals. Such intense coherence can make it very difficult for a religious adherent to understand or take seriously opposing religious views,
including atheistic ones that reject religion altogether. If faith is to be a source of knowledge, it cannot be accidental or arbitrary. The second obvious problem in using religious faith as a basis of belief is that there have been many cases where beliefs based on it have turned out to be false. For example, the Catholic Church rejected the Copernican ideas of Galileo as heresy, but today even fundamentalists grant that the earth moves around the sun. Biological evolution was initially rejected as incompatible with the Bible, but today most Christians acknowledge that evolution occurred. Before modern medicine, many people believed that diseases are God's punishment for bad acts, but now we know that they have natural causes. Not all proponents of religion would accept these revisions, but many have recognized that theological descriptions of the motions of planets, the origin of species, and the causes of diseases are erroneous. Scientific beliefs have also turned out to be false, in accord with the expectation, discussed below, that new evidence and new hypotheses will lead to changing beliefs. Religious faith meshes with tendencies in human thinking that are very natural even though they often lead to errors. One is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to notice only examples that support our beliefs while ignoring evidence that conflicts with it. For example, when religious leaders or texts make predictions, people tend to notice events that confirm those predictions, rather than events that refute them. Confirmation bias is a pervasive part of human thinking, as when people retain social stereotypes by noticing only cases that support the views they already hold. An even more powerful kind of support for religious beliefs is motivated inference, which is the tendency to use memory and evidence selectively in order to arrive at beliefs that facilitate our goals. Belief in God can enable people to feel better about many things they desire, such as immortality, divine love, freedom, personal success, and the group identity and
social support of their religious community. Unfortunately, the fact that a potential belief would help to accomplish your goals provides no reason for embracing the belief as true. Motivated inference and confirmation bias work together to make it very hard to change your mind even in the face of evidence that goes against what you want to believe. The philosopher Charles Taylor proposes to discuss belief and unbelief, not as rival theories to account for existence and morality, but as different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding the fullness and richness of our moral and spiritual life. But without theories that can be supported by evidence, there is no reason to prefer one kind of lived experience over another, or to think that the experienced richness is anything but illusion based on our motivations to believe that there is more to the universe than there actually is. These motivations are powerful, offering reassurances of life after death and a divine plan ensuring that everything happens for a reason. But lived religious experiences can be explained as the result of psychological factors that are not signs of a reality that transcends scientific theorizing. Your lived experience may tell you that your life is full because of a caring God, but in the past people have felt just as strongly that the earth is flat, that the sun revolves around it, and that earthquakes are divine punishments. The third serious problem of religious faith is that there have been many cases where actions based on it have turned out to be evil. To take just a few examples of faith-based intolerance, prejudice, and persecution, consider Christian crusader massacres, anti-Semitic pogroms, and the murder of thousa
มุมมองทางศาสนากับแนวทางปรัชญาของอริสโตเติล โดยมากการทำงานของอาริสโตเติลเป็นไปตามข้อสังเกตุผลของโลกทางกายภาพ ชีวภาพ และสังคม สนทนายุคกลางของอาริสโตเติลมีแนวโน้มจะ รักษางานเขียนของเขาเป็นแบบข้อความศักดิ์สิทธิ์เกือบเป็นมินท์เป็นคัมภีร์หรือ Koran Veneration ของข้อความที่ถูกท้าทาย โดยการปฏิวัติทางวิทยาศาสตร์ของศตวรรษ sixteenth และ seventeenth หลังจากที่สังคมรอยัลลอนดอนก่อตั้งขึ้นในค.ศ. 1660 คำขวัญกลายเป็น "Nullius ใน verba ติ"ไม่มีอะไรในคำนี้" วลีนี้แสดงความมุ่งมั่นเพื่อสร้างข้อสรุปเกี่ยวกับวิธีการทดลองเช่นที่ใช้ โดยสมาชิกก่อตั้งโรเบิร์ตบอยล์และโรเบิร์ต Hooke วิธีดังกล่าวต่าง starkly กับพึ่งศักดิ์สิทธิ์ทางศาสนา และปรัชญาข้อความ ถึงแม้ว่านักวิทยาศาสตร์หลาย เช่นไอแซกนิวตัน ศาสนายังคงอยู่ ในศตวรรษที่ eighteenth อย่างไรก็ตาม ความขัดแย้งระหว่างวิทยาศาสตร์และศาสนากลายเป็นชัดเจนในงานเขียนของนักปรัชญาเช่น Voltaire และฮูม David วันนี้ นักวิทยาศาสตร์ชั้นนำส่วนใหญ่เป็นอเทวนิยมหรือ agnostics การปฏิเสธการมีอยู่ของพระเจ้า หรือแสดงความสงสัยเกี่ยวกับเรื่องนี้ ที่สุดอื่น ๆ fundamentalists ศาสนาในทั้งคริสเตียน และอิสลามประเพณีปฏิเสธวิทยาศาสตร์เป็น propounding มุมมองที่ไม่ผิดเพียง แต่ยังชั่ว วันนี้ thinkers บางพยายามง้อวิทยาศาสตร์และศาสนา โดยคลายอยู่ทางศาสนาที่ทำให้พวกเขาเข้ากันได้กับผลการวิจัยทางวิทยาศาสตร์ หรือการมอบหมายต่าง ๆ ด้านวิทยาศาสตร์และศาสนา ตัวอย่าง นักชีววิทยา Stephen เจย์ Gould โต้เถียงว่า วิทยาศาสตร์และศาสนาครอบครองพื้นที่แยกความกังวล กับวิทยาศาสตร์ที่มีความรับผิดชอบสำหรับเรื่องประจักษ์เช่นว่าวิวัฒนาการเกิดขึ้น แต่ มีศาสนาที่เหลืออิสระ และสิ่งสำหรับคำถามของศีลธรรมและความหมาย มุมมองของฉันอยู่ที่ศีลธรรมและความหมายแม้จะดีเวลาผ่านหลักฐานทางวิทยาศาสตร์กว่า โดยศาสนา เราตอนนี้ดูที่ความแตกต่างระหว่างความคิด ตามหลักฐาน และ ตามความเชื่อHow Faith Works According to the Website adherents.com, 84 percent of the more than 6 billion people in the world today support some religious group. The largest religions are Christianity, with 2.1 billion members in various denominations, and Islam, with around 1.5 billion. Both of these religions believe in just one god, unlike the third largest religion, Hinduism. And both have central texts, the New and Old Testament Bible for Christians, and the Koran for Muslims. They also have historically important religious leaders, such as St. Paul for Christians and Muhammad for Muslims, as well as contemporary leaders such as the pope and cardinals for Catholics and ayatollahs for Shiite Muslims. Christianity and Islam both have subgroups, with many different kinds of Protestants opposed to Catholics, and Sunni Muslims often in conflict with Shiites over doctrines and practices. Religious faith is a belief in, trust in, and devotion to gods, leaders, or texts, independent of evidence. For example, Catholics believe in God and saints such as Mary the mother of Jesus, and they also trust the pope and the Bible as sources that reveal the word of God. A belief is faith based if the source of its acceptance is supposed communication from a deity, leader, or text. If you are religious and have a moral dilemma about whether to lie to a friend, you can pray to God, consult a religious leader such as a priest, or read a religious text such as the Bible. Your aim is to get a faithbased answer that will tell you what you are morally obliged to do. Faith can also propose answers to factual questions, such as the age of the universe: fundamentalist Christians consult the Old Testament and their ministers and conclude that the universe began around six thousand years ago, in contrast to the fourteen billion or so years that scientific evidence suggests. Religious faith is enormously important to the lives of billions of people, but it faces three serious problems as a means of deciding what to believe or what to do: variations amongreligions, falsity of religious beliefs, and evil actions based on religion. The first problem is that religions vary greatly in what gods, leaders, and texts they propose to believe in, and faith provides no basis for choosing among them. Should you have faith in the single Christian God, or in the dozens of Hindu gods such as Shiva? Who is a better guide to life, St. Paul or Muhammad? Should you listen to the Catholic pope or to a Protestant minister? Should you seek wisdom in the Bible, the Koran, or the Book of Mormon? There are major disagreements within and across various religions, and faith provides no way of settling such disagreements other than simply shouting that your faith is better than the others. Religious faiths cannot all be right, but they can all be wrong. For most people, the religious faith that they acquire is an accident of birth. Consider two prominent examples, former American president George W Bush and Arab leader Osama bin Laden. Many of Bush's beliefs and decisions are based on his religious faith, which derives from his Christian Protestant background. He became more deeply religious in his early forties, giving up drinking and undertaking serious study of the Bible. Osama bin Laden has a very different set of beliefs and values, but they are also heavily faith based, deriving from his Muslim upbringing and subsequent study. Obviously, there are many Christians who do not share Bush's attitudes, and many Muslims who do not share bin Laden's, so religion is not the only determinant of their beliefs. But it is equally obvious that the particular faith that most people acquire is the result of their family circumstances. From a child's point of view, acquiring the parents' religious views makes sense, as the parents are the source of many kinds of reliable information. Once children are exposed to particular religions, their doctrines can become highly coherent with their other beliefs and personal goals. Such intense coherence can make it very difficult for a religious adherent to understand or take seriously opposing religious views,
including atheistic ones that reject religion altogether. If faith is to be a source of knowledge, it cannot be accidental or arbitrary. The second obvious problem in using religious faith as a basis of belief is that there have been many cases where beliefs based on it have turned out to be false. For example, the Catholic Church rejected the Copernican ideas of Galileo as heresy, but today even fundamentalists grant that the earth moves around the sun. Biological evolution was initially rejected as incompatible with the Bible, but today most Christians acknowledge that evolution occurred. Before modern medicine, many people believed that diseases are God's punishment for bad acts, but now we know that they have natural causes. Not all proponents of religion would accept these revisions, but many have recognized that theological descriptions of the motions of planets, the origin of species, and the causes of diseases are erroneous. Scientific beliefs have also turned out to be false, in accord with the expectation, discussed below, that new evidence and new hypotheses will lead to changing beliefs. Religious faith meshes with tendencies in human thinking that are very natural even though they often lead to errors. One is confirmation bias, which is the tendency to notice only examples that support our beliefs while ignoring evidence that conflicts with it. For example, when religious leaders or texts make predictions, people tend to notice events that confirm those predictions, rather than events that refute them. Confirmation bias is a pervasive part of human thinking, as when people retain social stereotypes by noticing only cases that support the views they already hold. An even more powerful kind of support for religious beliefs is motivated inference, which is the tendency to use memory and evidence selectively in order to arrive at beliefs that facilitate our goals. Belief in God can enable people to feel better about many things they desire, such as immortality, divine love, freedom, personal success, and the group identity and
social support of their religious community. Unfortunately, the fact that a potential belief would help to accomplish your goals provides no reason for embracing the belief as true. Motivated inference and confirmation bias work together to make it very hard to change your mind even in the face of evidence that goes against what you want to believe. The philosopher Charles Taylor proposes to discuss belief and unbelief, not as rival theories to account for existence and morality, but as different kinds of lived experience involved in understanding the fullness and richness of our moral and spiritual life. But without theories that can be supported by evidence, there is no reason to prefer one kind of lived experience over another, or to think that the experienced richness is anything but illusion based on our motivations to believe that there is more to the universe than there actually is. These motivations are powerful, offering reassurances of life after death and a divine plan ensuring that everything happens for a reason. But lived religious experiences can be explained as the result of psychological factors that are not signs of a reality that transcends scientific theorizing. Your lived experience may tell you that your life is full because of a caring God, but in the past people have felt just as strongly that the earth is flat, that the sun revolves around it, and that earthquakes are divine punishments. The third serious problem of religious faith is that there have been many cases where actions based on it have turned out to be evil. To take just a few examples of faith-based intolerance, prejudice, and persecution, consider Christian crusader massacres, anti-Semitic pogroms, and the murder of thousa
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