I like the idea of working, for clarity's sake, with the simple Yanomamo model rather than the complex Judeo-Christian one.

It appears that the Yanomamo people have no religion.

Yes, they have legends and folklore, but at the bottom line those do not make them more generous and less stingy.

Had the beliefs of the Yanomamo helped them become less greedy, less selfish, thus closer to God (by that I don't mean Wadawadirawa), then I would be inclined to believe that they do have a religion. The test is in the results, not in the ideas.

The ideas of Wadawadirawa, Shobari Waka and Hedu MAY be used (in such a primitive tribal society) as a religious technique, but apparently it's a failed one. Perhaps it could succeed if they believed that Wadawadirawa had binoculars to watch their actions from the sky, but they don't. Whether Wadawadirawa himself exists or not is of least importance, in fact a silly question. Unfortunately people (both theists and atheists) tend to confuse religious techniques for religion itself.

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Dear LEGO,

<<Science involves explaining the natural world through mathematics, chemistry and physics, while religion involves explaining the natural world through the intervention of supernatural forces.>>

Not so. What you describe is a distortion of religion. It may be that at some stage in history, particular people benefited religiously from the idea of intervention by supernatural forces. Whether such supernatural forces in fact exist is irrelevant - what's relevant is that some people who so believed became more moral and less selfish as a result, thus closer to God. That's again a case of confusing between a particular religious technique and religion itself.

<<I know that there are religious scientists, and how they reconcile that clear contradiction, I do not know.>>

There is no contradiction. Science is about knowing the physical universe while religion is about coming closer to God. They are completely unrelated goals.

There is however a conflict between the two, for those unrelated goals compete over one's time and attention. However, that's no different for example than watching sports, which conflicts with both.

Antiseptic,

>> How could anybody take the idea that some things are not empirically definable?<<

What do you mean by that? There are many things in mathematics even in physics and elsewhere that are well defined but not “empirically”, if I understood you properly.

You are probably refering to the paper “The evolution of eusociality” written by EO Wilson in cooperation with Martin A. Nowak and C. E. Tarnita.

Nowak is a Harvard Professor of Mathematics and Biology, the author of “Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed” with R. Highfield (Free Press 2011) that “looks beyond ‘The Selfish Gene’ and invites us to think afresh about evolution”.

Now EO Wilson is, I believe, something of an agnostic or even atheist. On the other hand, Nowak is a self-confessed Catholic. A good illustration that different religious attitudes don’t have to be an obstacle for cooperation as scientists.

Dear david f,

Thank you for the clear nutshell info about Spinoza’s philosophy. You made me want to read more thoroughly what is in http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spinoza/.

I suspect that in his times hardly any other than literal interpretation of the bible would have been sanctioned by authorities, Jewish or Christian. Probably all serious contemporary Jewish or Christian biblical interpreters, exegetes, would have been excommunicated as well.

Spinoza identifies God with Nature, but apparently does not think the separate label for God is superfluous. I still don’t know whether he had a notion of our “science” and if he had, whether he would assume that his God must be within the reach of scientific investigations (as today those who require a scientific evidence for God do). Anyhow, it is probably futile to try to find out how a thinker who lived centuries ago would answer questions, react to situations, that did not exist in his times. (I was 14 when I asked my father how would Aquinas react if he saw a TV, whether he would think that small people or small devils lived inside that box. I don’t remember what he replied.)

Dear Banjo,

>> If “divine action” is a reality, George, then I see no reason why science should not have access to it sooner or later.<<

I am not sure what you mean by it being a “reality”. What I wrote is that if you do not believe in God then the question of whether and how the non-existent God acted does not make sense.

On the other hand, events, or phenomena that a theist sees as miracles or divine acts, are naturally amenable to scientific investigation. I devoted a whole paragraph to that. It is their interpretation that can be either theist or materialist (and, of course should not clash with what is established by science). I was not concerned with materialist interpretations or explanation of such events, but one possibility is certainly to dismiss them as fruits of the imagination

George, if you really think you have an empirical way to detect the existence of God, then why are you wasting your time writing apologetic articles for a handful of readers? Come out with it, prove it works, publish the results, pick up your Nobel Prize and earn the undying gratitude of either the theists or the atheists.

Or is this just more unfounded speculation?

Hi George, it was a rhetorical question. Empiricism forms the basis for rational reasoning, but it doesn't provide any first-cause bases for the empirical observations and it is limited to deductive and inductive processing. What is missing is abductive processes that allow leaps from one chain of empirical/rational reasoning to inform another.

That's the part that positivism has trouble with and it leaves room for God.

Yuyutsu, if a God created the universe, what was he (she?) doing before the universe existed?

He (she?) was doing nothing, because there was nothing to do. What was he (she?) thinking of? Nothing, because there was nothing to think about. Where was he living? Nowhere, because there was nowhere to live. Then he (she?) got an idea "lets create EVERYTHING." So he (she?) flew around outer space at a speed exceeding the speed of light, and whacked big lumps of nothing together to create a hundred billion (that we know of) galaxies containing a (on average) a hundred billion stars, including supermassive stars 120 times bigger than our sun, and supermassive black holes of a billion solar masses.

Yeah. Pull the other one. It plays "Jingle Bells."

"But Captain, that does not compute."