Can Science And Religion Coexist Peacefully?

[joekgamer]

If you continue to read the paragraph you provided, they give examples of how the immune system responds.

 

The loci are the wound, with activation of macrophages and production of proinflammatory mediators, and the microcirculation with activation of endothelial cells, blood elements, and a capillary leak

 

I admit that I am not a biologist, so I don't understand very well what 'macrophanges', 'endothelial cells', etc. are, but I can get the basic gist of what this sentence means. It is saying that the immune system protects you from the wound becoming worse, but I cannot see where it claims that the immune system helps heal the wound. If I missed that part (probably because of some misunderstanding on my part), then please correct me.

[dduckwessel]

If you continue to read the paragraph you provided, they give examples of how the immune system responds.

 

 

 

I admit that I am not a biologist, so I don't understand very well what 'macrophanges', 'endothelial cells', etc. are, but I can get the basic gist of what this sentence means. It is saying that the immune system protects you from the wound becoming worse, but I cannot see where it claims that the immune system helps heal the wound. If I missed that part (probably because of some misunderstanding on my part), then please correct me.

 

If garlic boosts the immune system then it stands to reason that would aid healing in an indirect sense. The natural antiobiotic properties could then kick in to prevent infection and the sulphur content would aid healing of the wounds. I don't even know what the argument is - semantics perhaps!!

 

If you had shingles (due to a compromised immune system) for instance, a doctor would never tell you to go home and crush two aspirins in a capful of finger nail polish (acetone) and dab that on your skin, saving you money, time and a great deal of physical pain. NO! The doctor would prescribe a medication (so that big pharma could further line its pockets) that would not work as quickly (1-2 applications) and as efficiently.

 

Sorry, I'm way off topic but give me garlic any day!

[C1ay]

You specifically said,

 

The immune system doesn't help recover from physical injuries.

 

That is categorically incorrect....

 

 

If you continue to read the paragraph you provided, they give examples of how the immune system responds.I admit that I am not a biologist, so I don't understand very well what 'macrophanges', 'endothelial cells', etc. are, but I can get the basic gist of what this sentence means. It is saying that the immune system protects you from the wound becoming worse, but I cannot see where it claims that the immune system helps heal the wound. If I missed that part (probably because of some misunderstanding on my part), then please correct me.

 

Macrophanges are white blood cells. They are what attacks foreign bodies that invade your body at the time of an injury that breaches the skin. They are essential to recovery from that injury. Without an immune system you would not recover from such injuries.

[joekgamer]

Yes, your immune system enables you to recover from an injury. However, it does not activly help you heal, which would be a requirement for the wound to heal (and this is the key part) faster.

 

The question is not weather or not you heal, but how quickly you heal.

[Qfwfq]

I am not a biologist, so I don't understand very well what 'macrophanges'

Even if you were a biologist, you wouldn't know what 'macrophanges' are. You'd more likely know what macrophages are.

:P

I don't see the point of insisting on arguing that the immune system doesn't make you heal faster, when you would hardly ever heal without it. You heal more slowly if it is weak and faster if it is strong.

[HydrogenBond]

When you put on the seatbelt, before driving the car, you have faith this will protect you. This is faith in fear/risk even if the odds are a million to 1 your fear will come true. Relgious faith is simimlar. It has long odds but this faith is not based on fear but on positive expectations. Two sides of the same coin.

[Sci]

Religion wishes to dictate what is; however, this disagrees with what is found, and so there can hardly be any peaceful coexistence.

 

For example, evil spirits do not cause physical ills or mental ills referred to as sins; forms are not immutable; etc.

 

The deathly spiral of paradox ever follows

The carving of wishes into the stone hollows

Of dogma forever blocked from the allowables.

 

The believing dance grinds to the elemental

Of that Being who can never be fundamental.

 

All such tales of original stuff made of love

End where there’s nothing to make it of.

[Maine farmer]

I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that the Big Bang Theory was first proposed by, I think, a French Monk. I'm not sure he was french, but I'm fairly sure it was a monk.

[Sci]

I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that the Big Bang Theory was first proposed by, I think, a French Monk. I'm not sure he was french, but I'm fairly sure it was a monk.

 

 

Monsignor Georges Lemaître, a priest from the Catholic University of Louvain, proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, he called it his "hypothesis of the primeval atom".

[HydrogenBond]

Quote:

Originally most science research took place in Roman Catholic universities that were staffed by members of religious orders who had the education and means to conduct scientific investigation.[1] Catholic universities, scholars and many priests including Nicolaus Copernicus, Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus, Robert Grosseteste, Nicholas Steno, Francesco Grimaldi, Giambattista Riccioli, Roger Boscovich, Athanasius Kircher, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître and many others, were responsible for many important scientific discoveries. Since the late 16th century the Jesuits have produced the large majority of priest-scientists, who contributed to worldwide cultural exchange by spreading their developments in knowledge to Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

[Sci]

Even Galileo was a believer, but he noted that the heavens didn't go the way the Bible said they did.

[CraigD]

Originally most science research took place in Roman Catholic universities that were staffed by members of religious orders who had the education and means to conduct scientific investigation.

…

Since the late 16th century the Jesuits have produced the large majority of priest-scientists, who contributed to worldwide cultural exchange by spreading their developments in knowledge to Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Mustn’t ignore Anglican universities, such as Oxford! Isaac Newton, arguable the most significant physicist ever, studied there. In the 16th century, when Newton studied, all English university students were effectively also divinity students, and although not all became congregation-tending priests, all where in principle trained to, and obligated to if called up by a high enough religious authority.

 

While this, and many historic records, suggest than many ca. 1650 Anglican scientist were clergy only because it was necessary to obtain scientific education and legitimacy, many of them were serious theologians and devout believers – though what sort of supernatural being(s) inspired them is debatable. In evidence, the greatest volume of Newton’s writing was not math and physics, but Christian theology, while much of his time was spent in the pursuit of esoteric, alchemitic knowledge which in other times or places would have been considered seriously blasphemous witchcraft – in short, Newton was a scientist/mathematician/clergyman/dark arts devotee!

 

Nowadays, though some clergy, predominantly Catholic, continue to be good professional scientists, it’s no longer requires to be clergy to be educated, so most scientists are not clergy. The academic split between math/science and not only theology but practically every non mathematical/scientific discipline has prompted critical essays such as Snow’s The Two Cultures (old but essential reading, IMHO). Snow, I think, put most of the blame for this not on scientists for dismissing liberal arts, but for liberal artists failing to be conversant in even introductory math and science. Excerpting from TTC:

I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s, “Have you noticed how the word ‘intellectual' is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me? It does seem rather odd, don't y'know.”

 

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”

 

I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, “Can you read?” — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had

 

Observations like Snow’s prompt me to rephrase this thread's title question “can science and anything but science coexist peacefully?”

[Sci]

In evidence, the greatest volume of Newton’s writing was not math and physics, but Christian theology, while much of his time was spent in the pursuit of esoteric, alchemitic knowledge which in other times or places would have been considered seriously blasphemous witchcraft – in short, Newton was a scientist/mathematician/clergyman/dark arts devotee!

 

Newton was a bit cranky, too, and spent a lot of time going against the Trinity, and searching Egyptian tombs, I think.

 

Here's something both fun and informational that I put together from some readings:

HALLEY, NEWTON, AND HOOKE

 

Halley was a sea captain, a cartographer, a professor

Of geometry, a deputy of the Royal Mint, an astronomer,

And the inventor of the deep-sea diving bell,

And wrote some on magnetism, tides,

Planet motions, and fondly on opium.

 

He invented the weather map and actuarial table ages,

Even proposed methods to work out the Earth’s old age,

Its distance from the sun, even how to keep fresh fish,

But one thing he didn’t do was to discover Halley’ comet,

For he merely noted that it was yet another return of it.

 

He made a wager with Robert Hooke, the cell describer,

And with the great and stately Christopher Wren:

They bet upon why the planets’ orbit were ellipses.

 

Hooke, a known credit-taker,

Claimed he’d solved the problem,

But had to conceal it

So that others could yet know the satisfaction.

Well, Halley became consumed with finding the answer,

So he called upon the Lucasian Mathematics Professor.

 

Isaac Newton was indeed brilliant beyond measure,

But was solitary, joyless, paranoid—no pleasure.

 

Once he’d inserted a needle in his eye and poked around,

Far inserting the bodkin between the eye and the bone.

Another time, he’d stared at the sun for so very long

That he had to spend many days in a darkened room.

 

Frustrated by mathematics, Isaac invented the calculus,

And then for twenty-seven years kept it hidden from us.

Likewise, doing the same with the understanding of light

And spectroscopy, keeping it for thirty years in the dark.

 

For Newton,

Science was but a partial part

Of his life’s routes,

For much of his time

Was given to alchemy

And religious pursuits.

 

He was wholeheartedly devoted

To the religion of Arianism,

Whose main tenet was

That there could be no Holy Trinity.

 

Ironically, he worked as a Professor at Trinity College,

Although the only one there who was not Anglican.

He also spent an inordinate amount of time studying

The floor plan of the lost temple of Solomon the King,

Even learning Hebrew, the better to scan the texts.

 

Another single minded quest was

To turn base metals Into precious ones,

His papers revealing this preoccupation

Over optics and planetary motions and such mentations.

 

Well, Halley asked Newton what the curve would be

If the planets’ attraction toward the sun was

The reciprocal to the square of their distance from it.

Newton promptly answered, of course, an “ellipse”.

 

Not finding his calculations of it

Newton not only rewrote it,

But retired for two years to produce his master work,

The Plilosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

 

To Halley’s horror,

Newton refused to release the crucial 3rd volume,

Without which the first two would make little sense.

There had been a dispute between Newton and Hooke

Over the priority of the inverse square law in the book.

 

That solved by Halley’s diplomacy, the Royal Society

Had pulled out from the publication, failing financially,

For, the year before, there had been a very costly flop

Called The History of Fishes; so, Halley himself popped

The funds for the publication out of his own pocket.

 

Newton contributed nothing,

As usual, and, to make matters worse,

Halley had just taken a position as the society’s clerk,

They failing to pay the promised 50 pounds to his purse,

Paying him only with very many copies of

The History of Fishes!

[HydrogenBond]

Before the invention of the quantum theory, science understood reality in terms of continuous functions (analog) instead of discontinuous functions like quantum theory (quantum states).

 

What quantum theory did was lower the entropy or degrees of freedom of the perceieved universe, since quantum means distinct states with gaps between these distinct states (less degrees of freedom or entropy). Based on this lowered perception of entropy God is not predictable within that limit. Traditionally, even the gaps between were included in continuous functions. This allowed concepts like god, to occupy places in the gaps between quantum states (more degrees of freedom).

 

Athough existing in the gaps between quantum states seems odd, consider the empire state building. Using the natural laws and probabiities of quantum theory, the odds are essentially zero for the empire state building to spontaneously appear, naturally. Yet it exists in reality. It exists in the gaps between what is predictable by quantum theory.

 

This proves it is possible for all types of things to exist within the gaps between what follows naturally from the quantum theory, with human nature helping to fill in the gaps back to continuous functions. God by being omnipresent implies he will be found as a function that can exist in both the quantum space and quantum gaps at the same time. The empire state building would be considered as stemming from the divine nature within humans since it exists in the continuum of which quantum is a part, using both aspects at the same time.

[joekgamer]

...What?

 

The Empire State Building was built by people. It did not 'spontaniously appear, naturally'.

 

Also, Quantum Mechanics does not say that 'it is possible for all types of things to exist within the gaps'. Quantum mechanics provides an explaination for the behavior of electrons. That is true. However, it does not claim that the space between the electrons is anything but normal.

 

So, prove that a god/gods/etc exists at all before claiming that they exist between electron orbits.

[Sci]

Einstein showed that there is no simultaneity, thus no omnipresence is possible.

[Maine farmer]

I just remembered today that I have another anecdote of unlikely healing. A few years ago I had a lump in my throat that persisted for some time, so I went to my primary care physician. He was concerned it might be cancer, so he referred me to a specialist and scheduled an ultrasound of the lump. The specialist diagnosed it as a Thyroglossal Duct Cyst. He said they are hardly ever cancerous, but it could continue to grow and become a problem, and he strongly recomended surgery. It was the beginning of haying season, and I don't like the idea of surgery unless I am in iminant danger of death, so I asked him if there was any chance the cyst would go away on it's own. He said that would be "highly unlikely" and he pressured me further to consent to surgery. I told him that unless this thing was killing me, I had too much work to do to take any time for the surgery, and I would be back after the crops were in unless the cyst went away on it's own. I never went back. The cyst the doctor was so certain required surgical removal went away and hasn't returned.

 

I don't claim it was miraculous, but I wonder if I had less faith and had been scared by the good doctor, would I not be worse off. I would have consented to unnecessary surgery and faced possible complications. Scare tactics from doctors do not inspire confidence in them or the science.