Compatibility of Religion and Science

I just read a quote from an Muslim philospher.

Averroes(Ibn Rushd) was a Muslim philosopher, physician and astronomer from Cordoba, Spain. He had a theory for interpreting the Quran:

"If the apparent meaning of Scripture conflicts with demonstrative conclusions it must be interpreted allegorically"

Source on Google Books

This video is also well worth watching

I need to give it further thought. Here are my notes of the highlights:

It seems too simple to say life and the world can be described one way on Sundays for religious purposes and another day on weekdays for all other purposes.

Acquiring a belief in God is more like falling into or out of love than winning or losing an argument.

Scientific beliefs give us the ability to predict space and time in a practical useful way. Religious beliefs give meaning to our lives in an emotionally satisfying context.

Science oversteps its bounds when it tells us we have no right to believe in God now that we have better explanations for the phenomena that God was previously used to explain.

Abandon the idea that there is one way the world really is and Science & Religion are competing to tell us what way that really is.

There is no such thing as the search for truth if that search is distinct from the search for greater human happiness.

We call a belief true when no competing truth serves the same purpose equally well.

We want prediction and control and scientific beliefs give us that. We also want our lives to have significance. We want to love something with all our heart and soul and mind and philosophical and religious beliefs sometimes help in that attempt.

Different human needs give rides for different beliefs. One description is satisfactory for one human need but not satisfactory for all human needs.

Some suggest that if belief is established on insufficient evidence the pleasure is a stolen one. It is sinful because it is stolen in rejection of our duty to mankind. It is wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence.

Is evidence something that floats free? Or does it satisfy a human need? It's reasonable to demand evidence when in a common enterprise. But when searching for meaning it's not clear that we have an obligation to produce evidence.

Our passional nature must decide an option between propositions whenever it is a genuine option that cannot, by its nature, be decided on intellectual grounds.

There are certain live, momentous and forced options which people face and can’t be decided by anything that some would be willing to call evidence. An option is live if we can't help thinking about it; if we can't help feeling it's important. Options that are live for some people are not live for other people. People's sense of importance differs.

It's momentous if, unlike the live option of going to the movies or staying home and working, decision between the alternatives will have far reaching effects. It's forced if there's no way of splitting the difference, no way of fudging the issue. It cannot be decided on intellectual grounds if there is no consensus in the relevant community of what criteria should be used for arriving at a decision.

What counts as a live, forced and momentous option will vary between cultures and individuals. Some people raised agnostic will not think about religion at all. The option of becoming a religious believer is not live. It may become "live" if they fall in love with someone who refuses to marry a non-catholic.

There are no options that all of humanity has the responsibility to confront because options vary with each physical location. Should we withhold belief in the absence of evidence and be bound to belief when consensus of evidence is reached?

To search for truth is to search for beliefs that work. For beliefs that get us what we want.

One human pleasure is in finding beautiful comprehensive theories. We have no responsibilities to something called truth but only responsibilities to other human beings.

The question of whether there is evidence for a belief is the question of whether there exists a certain human community which takes certain relatively non controversial propositions as providing good reason for that belief.

(25:34) Where there is such a community to which we want to belong we have an obligation to not to believe a proposition unless we can give some good reasons for doing so; reasons that the community takes to be good ones. Where there is no such community, we don’t.

Nobody knows what would count as non-question-begging evidence for the claims of the Catholic or Mormon Church to be “the one true church.” But that does not and should not matter to the Catholic or Mormon communities.

Some see it as a question between intellectual grounds and emotional needs. That suggests humans having two distinct faculties with two distinct purposes; one for knowing and another for feeling. This picture has to be abandoned, once one gives up the idea that there is a special human purpose called “knowing the truth;” or getting in touch with the intrinsic nature of reality.

Instead we should see human minds as webs of belief and desire; so interwoven with each other that it’s not easy to see when a choice has been made on purely intellectual grounds or on merely emotional grounds. Nor is it useful to divide areas of culture or life into those in which there is objective knowledge and those in which there is only subjective opinion. These traditional epistemological distinctions are misleading ways of making a distinction of areas where we do have an obligation to other people to justify our beliefs and desires and areas in which we don’t have such an obligation.

Replace the intellect/passion distinction with what needs justification and what doesn’t. A business proposal needs intellectual justification, a marriage proposal doesn’t. This makes possible a less rigorous ethics of belief. This pragmatist ethics says our right to happiness is limited only by others rights not to have their own pursuits of happiness interfered with. This right to happiness also includes the right to believe. It includes the rights to faith, hope and love. These often cannot be justified and shouldn’t need to be.

This ethics of belief is an extension of utilitarianism. The only time we can criticise another person’s belief is when that person’s belief is made an excuse for interfering with other human projects.

Some will call this a godless creed. Beware of pragmatists baring gifts. They may say beware of the belief that anyone has the right to believe anything as long as their doing so doesn’t compromise any co-operative enterprise to which to which they have committed themselves. They may suggest that utilitarianism can only be accepted by someone with no religious feelings.

If Christ taught that “love is the only law,” then all other beliefs and creeds are secondary to this overriding obligation. A life that rejects such service, no matter how many sacraments are received, does not meet the obligation.

It’s possible to include utilitarianism in this idea. All humans suffer pain on a moral par. They all deserve to have their needs satisfied in so far as this can be done without harm to others. Humans have been taught for centuries that God’s will was for humans to love one-another; that all men are brothers.