Science is not a lump of data or a community of people, it is a method of testing things. It is, more specifically, a method of testing if things are reliable, rather than if they are true, which is rather what has allowed science to beat all competition into submission. If you have a hypothesis that rocks move towards rock and water moves towards water, then you can test that by looking at the flow of a river and dropping a heavy rock into it. The river flows to the ocean and the rock sinks to the riverbed. Science will tell you that that is reliable... and if all you want to know is whether the river is flowing into the ocean or what will happen if you drop a heavy rock in the open then you can rely upon it pretty well. But then you try dropping a rock along the side of a sheer cliff, or flood-waters spill into the end of a river, or have a river that is affected by tides, then these extreme tests prove the theory false, but the theory was never "true" and it still works for its established purpose, and people might even choose to continue using a false theory because it works and the maths is easier... Scientific theories ARE "just" theories, that is science's strength. Scientific theories are reliable to a degree that very nearly no "fact" can ever hope to achieve. People make fools of themselves when they say that scientific theories are "just" theories not because they undervalue science, they don't, they make fools of themselves because they overvalue something else.
Science will never say that god does or doesn't exist, it can't, it can't say that anything does or does not exist. It CAN say if god is reliable in context. If god refuses to be tested, then science can say that god has reliably failed to be detected by any tests. Now, this is basically the default state for religion, given that people lump it into a big lump, but a lumpy-lump religion is useless, and while people spend a lot of time just enjoying their lumpy-lump religion, there come times when they have to tease a piece off of the lump and deal with something specific. Maybe they need a divine position on a moral quandary. Perhaps they want to perform a religious ceremony. Maybe they are evangelising and someone asks a specific question and they are not in the mood to just politician the question away... There are many reasons why religion would need to be something specific, and in those moment religion is actually defined, and when something is defined, it can be tested. Now, science is a matter of practicality. Not all definitions veer into the realm of the practical, so not everything can be scientifically tested, sometimes we have to use rationality or something instead, but science can do a lot. Science can demonstrate that souls do not account for any known physical phenomena. It can be that the sample size was too small and that person just didn't happen to have a soul, or that the non-biologically-synthesised human does have a soul, thus the need for large sample-sizes and control groups and such. So too might the testing apparatus be faulty, but again, testing can be rigorous to reduce this to a risk that is, from any sensible perspective, not a risk. Science can demonstrate that prayers don't change outcomes, and if you don't think that prayers are supposed to change outcomes, then you won't have a problem with that. Science can demonstrate that a holy relic possesses identical properties to an otherwise identical entity with no religious significance. Does a demonstration equal truth? No! but the rigours that science places upon its demonstrations make them more reliable than human memory or belief, unless you have never, in your whole life, come to believe that a prior belief was flawed. What did you believe when you were 5? Are you familiar with any studies into the reliability of human testimony?
Nobody believes that belief alone is sufficient. They only resort to such extremes when they are pressed. If your receive an E-mail asking for help to smuggle money away from a Somali Warlord, do you dismiss it because it is spam, or read it and judge if you believe them to be sincere, with no regard at all for your past experience or the knowledge that you have accumulated from your surroundings? Of course you base your decision on observed phenomena from your life. You may do so not-consciously. You might just embrace a truth that bubbles up from your instincts honed over al life of cautions and regrets. That doesn't mean that you are willing to accept belief in the compete absence of corroboration from consistent sources.
So no, science will never say that your worship is not accepted by a being that you have chosen. But it might just hint that you don't worship a being that exactly matches the description of what you thought yourself to worship, and if science ever does so, then it will do so with far more veracity than most any other source you could hope to find.
The existence of religious scientists is meaningless. Religions that have any hint of sanity have, like everyone else with a hint of sanity, learned that a fight with something that can make nukes is not going to be fun. Religion and science just don't have many points of contention anymore. Imagine a scientific study on torture in the midst of The Inquisition claiming that confessions were all completely unreliable. What of a study into infections that demonstrated that contributing factors had only vague correlation to religious virtues or vices, and some where outright inverted? It is extremely rare that religion will have any position at all on practical matters, it wasn't always this way...
Poll
70 (27.6%)
Author
Topic: Railgun and Spirituality Discussion (Read 582056 times)