Reply #60: Let us review. You want to argue generally religion conflicts with science. The problem with [View All]

[struggle4progress]

this sweeping hypothesis, on my view, is that the vague abstraction "religion" covers a wide range of distinct sociological phenomena, which are not uniformly opposed to scientific methods or scientific inquiry. A similar objection applies to the abstraction "science." Thus, "religion conflicts with science" is a sentence, which involves terms, that are so abstract, that the meaning of the sentence cannot be determined in any definite way. I can imagine, for example, agreeing with the sentence "My religion forces me to oppose vivisection experiments on human subjects" -- which, I suppose, would lead anyone, who admires Nazi concentration camp doctors, to view me as antiscientific -- while I disagree with the statements "My religion forces me to oppose teaching the theory of evolution" or "My religion forces me to avoid modern medical treatment." There are people who agree with one but not both of the last two sentences, and there are people who agree with both of them. The fact that one might consider oneself religious, while agreeing with zero, one, or two of the last sentences shows that by using the term "religion" in all such cases, one is applying an abstraction to rather different phenomena

What you seem not to understand about the difference between semantic and scientific definitions is this: the semantic definitions are to be judged according to the linguistic coherence of the resulting discourse, whereas the scientific definitions are to be judged according to whether they produce a discourse that accurately describes phenomena. The semantic definition is produced by ordering words or by laying out appropriate rules for the use of the word. The scientific definition, on the other hand, must begin from the phenomena

You write: You accuse me of Platonism, but it sounds more like you're the one treating religion as if it's some amorphous entity independent from familiar human manifestations of religion. It sounds as if you're expressing concern that if I'm not careful about how I define religion that I might miss recognizing new manifestations of religion or make a mistake about what religion and its characteristics "truly" are. But this misses the mark rather widely. Not being a Platonist, I in some sense do not really believe there is such a thing as "religion" at all. It is true that I find the concept amorphous, but that does not mean I believe it represents some "amorphous entity." The word "religion" is merely vague and evocative to me: in practice, I find that even people, who claim to share the same religion, may have widely divergent views

You argue: The best anyone can do in such a situation is to use the word in a way which a least achieves a fair degree of overlap with the way other people use the word, in a way which hopefully invokes a similar conceptual space even where there is disagreement on precise meaning. But from a scientific point of view, this is exactly backwards! You want to start with the word "religion" and then fine-tune its use to suit your argument. For scientific purposes, too much reliance on everyday language is counter-productive. The scientific point of view would be to examine phenomena first -- and make useful definitions later

This problem shows up clearly in your Catholic-condom example. It is true that the official Catholic position opposes condoms. This position seems to be based on a "natural-law" view that the biological-reproductive purpose of sexuality is primary, a view which someone could actually hold without even being Catholic. The position, however, has been contested in the Church -- and if you've followed the news in recent years, you will be aware that there is evidence of an internal power struggle over the doctrine, which the hardliners seem to be winning under the current Pope. A number of points of view have been expressed in this discussion, including, of course, some which seem very ignorant. But the habit of misreading every statement, as if it simply reflected ignorance and superstition, is dishonest: when the Vatican argues that if you engage in promiscuous sex but use condoms, you still have an elevated chance of contracting AIDS, compared to someone who abstains and does not use condoms, the Vatican's claim may actually be defensible -- even though it does not usefully promote condom-use by the non-abstinent. There may be a perfectly coherent logic in the Vatican position, even if one feels obligated to disagree with it for various reasons: in particular, one might think that the Vatican stance is counter-productive, and leads to the wrong sound-bite propaganda, without thinking that the view is superstitious. It seems to me that your approach -- which begins with the idea that "religion conflicts with science" and then cherry-picks examples to support your thesis -- produces no real insight