Neil Degrasse Tyson is quoted in an accessible meme as saying, "The good thing about science is that it is true whether or not you believe in it." I noted someone making this reply:
"I like Tyson; but he is disappointingly (if that's a word) prone to straw man attacks on religion, which are unnecessary not to mention just wrong. Speaking of which, the good thing about EVERYTHING true is that it's true whether you believe it or not. Science, religion, history, dentistry, ad infinitum. He's stumbled upon a truism.
Tyson was apparently trying to get at science´s ability to reduce the role of opinion in knowledge."
Ian Barbour, by contrast, observed that the subjective and objective both have important roles in science and religion. More on Barbour below.
The standard definition might be like M-W´s " 3: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.
b : such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : natural science"
Religion, meanwhile, is defined by M-W as "1 b i) the service and worship of God and the supernatural.
ii) commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance
2 a personalized set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices."
Here is a funny comic that can help think about Tyson´s attempt to refer to "true things." The view of the hymn is pre-evolutionary, since modern philosophy of religion indicates that the Big Bang hypothesis event refers to an a phenomenon in the finite past, some 14 bn years ago. Thus, modern theology would need to say, "God Created the Universe, and evolution made the animals great and small...."
"True" isn´t a scientific term itself, but it is philosophical.
An interesting angle is the development of the Big Bang hypothesis itself. George LeMaitre was a Catholic priest and physicist who used observational evidence about nebulae movement in 1927 even before Hubble confirmed the red shifting that indicates strongly that galaxies are accelerating as part of an expanding Universe. LeMaitre´s theory of expansion conflicted with the prevailing Static Universe theory that Einstein also accepted. Einstein didn´t accept the theory at first, but suggested some issues for LeMaitre to consider. LeMaitre informed Einstein about the problem of the infinite past and the Static Universe. Interestingly, Hubble´s more famous rediscovery of LeMaitre´s insight in the red shift expansion was something Hubble at first rejected as having objective reality. He rejected LeMaitre´s theory at first, even after his confirmation of the evidence. Einstein, meanwhile, accepted the Big Bang Theory quickly, and regretted his own "cosmological constant." We see that the subjective has been involved in science, and is involved. N D Tyson has been trying to popularize and position science as "better" and "truer" than religion, but illustrates how science advocates can often violate science´s own principles. Biologist and philosopher M Pigliucci puts it succinctly when he points out that science is a kind of philosophy. By the philosophy that comes out of Comparative Religious Studies in the Social Sciences and Humanities, we can say that Islam is the religion of many areas of the world, and the religious truths of that religion can be identified. It is true that Islam has rejected UN human rights and formed their own Cairo Declaration based on Sharia Law, just as the U.S. has not ratified the UN Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The UN´s human rights Declaration of Human Rights, including religion, was founded by the vision of the high integrity Christianity of then US President FD Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor. It is true that studies of meditation, prayer, and religious participation have shown important benefits. It is also true that UN Human Rights are consistent with the modernization of Jesus´ Commandment for Moses and God to "Love thy neighbor as thyself" in Commandment no 2 that includes religious pluralism.
The problem for Tyson and his fellow anti-theists is that science has its specific fields of study, and if you want to talk about other subjects like religion, you actually have to study it to understand it. Instead, they´re basically riding on two of the great conflicts that came up in history, heliocentrism vs. geocentrism and evolution of life vs. Divine creation of life and all living forms. In recent times, Climate Change has revealed another angle. Some businesspeople do not want to pay attention to environmental issues, including famously Climate Change, nor many social issues. Those businesspeople have supported the Religious Right, who are anti-science, among other things. By confusing all these things, science advocates represent what is in fact a religious ideology of science called scientism.
A modern scientist with a well-known insight was Stephen Jay Gould who used terminology from a papal document to describe science and religion as Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NoMA). More traditional academic philosophical term would be, "disciplines." Nuclear physicist and Christian Ian Hutchinson wrote the book The Monopoly of Knowledge to begin to study the problem of scientism versus science, and the truth of religion. Anti-theist biologist Massimo Pigliucci became a philosopher, but focuses on the limits of science, science´s philosophical nature, and the problem of scientism.
Ian Barbour got degrees in physics and religion, and became known for discussing the role of both the subjective and the objective in Science and Religion. The positions of Einstein, LeMaitre, and Hubble above serve as examples of how the subjective and objective interact in science. "The subjective include the theory on data, the resistance of comprehensive theories to falsification, and the absence of rules for choice among paradigms. Objective features include the presence of common data, evidence for or against a theory, and criteria which are not paradigm-dependent...." "In 2000 in When Science Meets Religion, he used a fourfold typology (Conflict, Independence, Dialogue, Integration) to relate religion and science that he had developed in his earlier writings." "I see evolution as God´s way of creating, Barbour said. "We are kin to other creatures, but at the same time we have very unique and distinctive properties. I don´t think it´s either/or." In his acceptance speech for the 1999 Templeton Prize, Barbour spoke about the need to break down barriers, using cloning as an example of science's ability to say what is possible and of religion to reflect on what is desirable."
Overall, the range of study of sociologist Rodney Stark addresses the range of accomplishments by Christianity, including ending slavery and in developing modern science, "Philosopher AN Whitehead in 1925 had grasped that Christian theology was essential for the rise of science in the West, just as surely as non-Christian theologies had stifled the scientific quest everywhere else. Whitehead ended his lecture with the remark that the images of gods found in other religions, especially in Asia, are too impersonal or too irrational to have sustained science....Christians Newton, Kepler, and Galileo regarded the creation itself as a book that was to be read and comprehended. The sixteenth-century French scientific genius Rene Descartes justified his search for natural “laws” on grounds that such laws must exist because God is perfect and therefore “acts in a manner as constant and immutable as possible,” except for the rare exceptions of miracles. In contrast, these critical religious concepts and motivations were lacking in those societies that seem otherwise to have had the potential to develop science but did not: China, Greece, and Islam...."
That perception of God through Jesus Christ provides a reference to his life, mission, and message in the spirit of his Commandments and teachings to engage in spiritual practice. All that needs to be evaluated in making assertions about what is true.
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