Excerpt #44 from my book, Religion, An Obstacle to Human Progress
To explain life, we have turned to two disciplines that are diametrically opposed: science and religion.
Science is a very formal, rigid, evidence-based discipline.
The key word is “evidence.”
Science requires testing and retesting to arrive at its principles and theories.
A scientific theory is not to be confused with a nonscientific theory where someone is casually theorizing about something.
A scientific theory is based on evidence and facts.
A scientific theory must survive a regimen of testing and re-testing by observers and scientists that produce identical results time after time before it is accepted as fact.
Science is almost perverse in its methodology of testing in attempts to get its theories to break.
Yet, science is a very open process that welcomes and celebrates change when new discoveries are made.
To command the professors of astronomy to confute their own observations is to enjoin an impossibility, for it is to command them not to see what they do see, and not to understand what they do understand, and to find what they do not discover. — Galileo Galilei, The Authority of Scripture in Philosophical Controversies
RELIGION INVENTS ITSELF.
Religion, on the other hand, is an untested collection of dogmatic principles.
Dogma is an arrogant assertion that someone’s ideas and opinions are facts without evidence to support them.
Religion is derived typically from supernatural sources and that which is referred to as “divine revelation.”
Divine revelation means communicating with gods and other supernatural entities.
You might wonder who came up with this stuff.
It’s important to understand that religion is a phenomenon born when “priests” and “priestesses” invented themselves, which they
continue to do today.
Religion does not like changes or challenge to its dogma.
The alteration of a few words of so-called “revealed religion” can unravel and splinter religions into smaller groups.
These in turn unravel and splinter into even smaller groups.
Christianity, for example, has more than forty-five thousand denominations.
Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence. — Richard Dawkins, the first Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University
Evidence of religion, art, and recorded events dates back fifty thousand years into the Old Stone Age.
There have been an estimated one hundred thousand religions.
Today, we have in excess of 4,000 religions, 150 of which have more than a million followers.
One wonders by what criteria one would decide objectively who or what to believe?
Some of the better-known religions include: Hinduism, which originated six thousand years ago; Judaism, four thousand years ago; Buddhism (and Confucianism and Taoism), twenty-six hundred years ago; Christianity, two thousand years ago; and Islam, fourteen hundred years ago.
WE ARE A SPECIES ADRIFT IN SEARCH OF A RUDDER