{"id":12156,"date":"2014-08-29T09:45:58","date_gmt":"2014-08-29T16:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12156"},"modified":"2014-08-29T09:45:58","modified_gmt":"2014-08-29T16:45:58","slug":"should-scientific-progress-affect-religious-beliefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2014\/08\/29\/should-scientific-progress-affect-religious-beliefs\/","title":{"rendered":"Should Scientific Progress Affect Religious Beliefs?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/23\/science-and-religion-are-not-compatible\/\">Sure<\/a> it <a href=\"http:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/15\/what-questions-can-science-answer\/\">should<\/a>. Here&#8217;s a new video from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/28\/closer-to-truth\/\">Closer to Truth<\/a>, in which I&#8217;m chatting briefly with Robert Lawrence Kuhn about the question. &#8220;New&#8221; in the sense that it was just put on YouTube, although we taped it back in 2011. (Now my formulations would be considerably more sophisticated, given the wisdom that comes with age).<\/p>\n<div class=\"lyte-wrapper\" title=\"Sean Carroll - Is the Universe Religiously Ambiguous?\" style=\"width:640px;max-width:100%;margin:5px;\"><div class=\"lyMe\" id=\"WYL_G923wvGvk7I\" itemprop=\"video\" itemscope itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/VideoObject\"><div><meta itemprop=\"thumbnailUrl\" content=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/G923wvGvk7I\/hqdefault.jpg\" \/><meta itemprop=\"embedURL\" content=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/G923wvGvk7I\" \/><meta itemprop=\"duration\" content=\"PT4M15S\" \/><meta itemprop=\"uploadDate\" content=\"2014-08-28T17:53:39Z\" \/><\/div><div id=\"lyte_G923wvGvk7I\" data-src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/G923wvGvk7I\/hqdefault.jpg\" class=\"pL\"><div class=\"tC\"><div class=\"tT\" itemprop=\"name\">Sean Carroll - Is the Universe Religiously Ambiguous?<\/div><\/div><div class=\"play\"><\/div><div class=\"ctrl\"><div class=\"Lctrl\"><\/div><div class=\"Rctrl\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><noscript><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/G923wvGvk7I\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/G923wvGvk7I\/0.jpg\" alt=\"Sean Carroll - Is the Universe Religiously Ambiguous?\" width=\"640\" height=\"340\" \/><br \/>Watch this video on YouTube<\/a><\/noscript><meta itemprop=\"description\" content=\"Does God exist or not exist? How can so many people be so absolutely sure? Maybe &#039;God&#039; and &#039;No God&#039; are both defensible. Could it be that the universe is somehow structured on a knife&#039;s edge, such that athiests and theists can both espouse their opposite views with equal conviction? What would such ambiguity mean? Donate to Closer To Truth and help us keep our content free and without paywalls: https:\/\/shorturl.at\/OnyRq For more on information and video interviews with Sean Carroll, please visit: http:\/\/bit.ly\/1BRsBIh For more videos on whether the universe is religiously ambiguous click here: http:\/\/bit.ly\/1MBMZHB For more Closer to Truth interview videos, please visit: http:\/\/www.closertotruth.com\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"lL\" style=\"max-width:100%;width:640px;margin:5px;\"><\/div><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s interesting that the &#8220;religious beliefs are completely independent of evidence and empirical investigation&#8221; meme has enjoyed such success in certain quarters that people express surprise to learn of the existence of theologians and believers who still think we can find evidence for the existence of God in our experience of the world. In reality, there are committed believers (&#8220;sophisticated&#8221; and otherwise) who feel strongly that we have evidence for God in the same sense that we have evidence for gluons or dark matter &#8212; because it&#8217;s the best way to make sense of the data &#8212; just as there are others who think that our knowledge of God is of a completely different kind, and therefore escapes scientific critique. It&#8217;s part of the problem that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reasonablefaith.org\/god-and-cosmology-the-existence-of-god-in-light-of-contemporary-cosmology#section_3\">theism is not well defined<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One can go further than I did in the brief clip above, to argue that any notion of God that <em>can&#8217;t<\/em> be judged on the basis of empirical evidence isn&#8217;t much of a notion at all. If God exists but has no effect on the world whatsoever &#8212; the actual world we experience could be precisely the same even without God &#8212; then there is no reason to believe in it, and indeed one can draw no conclusions whatsoever (about right and wrong, the meaning of life, etc.) from positing it. Many people recognize this, and fall back on the idea that God is in some sense <a href=\"http:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/god-necessary-being\/\">necessary<\/a>; there is no possible world in which he doesn&#8217;t exist. To which the answer is: &#8220;No he&#8217;s not.&#8221; Defenses of God&#8217;s status as necessary ultimately come down to some other assertion of a purportedly-inviolable metaphysical principle, which can always simply be denied. (The theist could win such an argument by demonstrating that the naturalist&#8217;s beliefs are incoherent in the absence of such principles, but that never actually happens.)<\/p>\n<p>I have more sympathy for theists who do try to ground their belief in evidence, rather than those who insist that evidence is irrelevant. At least they are playing the game in the right way, even if I disagree with their conclusions. Despite what Robert suggests in the clip above, the existence of disagreement among smart people does not imply that there is not a uniquely right answer!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sure it should. Here&#8217;s a new video from Closer to Truth, in which I&#8217;m chatting briefly with Robert Lawrence Kuhn about the question. &#8220;New&#8221; in the sense that it was just put on YouTube, although we taped it back in 2011. (Now my formulations would be considerably more sophisticated, given the wisdom that comes with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-religion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12156"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12160,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12156\/revisions\/12160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}