Craig,
I have a hard time reconciling two sentences you said in your last post, one after the other.

'Christianity has its basis in empirical observation.'
'The core dogma relating to divinity represents an abrogation of empiricism.'

These seems contradictory. I can't see how it can be both.

Cobber,
You won't dispense with 7 day creationists by mocking them. This only encourages them, as in this phrase from Luke's Gospel:

"What blessings await you when people hate you, and exclude you, and mock you, and curse you as evil because you follow the Son of Man." (6:22)

You might fare better attempting reason.

Hi Dan,
I don't think there's a contradiction. Religions, including Christianity, are all largely empirically based; that is, they are derived from observations and thoughts about the human condition. For the most part they represent attempts to explain and hence regulate the behaviours of people and the world in which they find themselves. In that regard they are the precursors to and the intellectual antecedents of modern science and philosophy and it is easy to show direct evolution from one to the other over time.

However, religions rely on a divine (imperfectly knowable) Mystery as a fundamental metaphysical (non-)explanation for things that are not readily amenable to empirical analysis. Since the tools available for such analysis didn't change a great deal until very recent times - the last couple of hundred years at most - this was readily defensible as a dogma, since it was well-shown to be beyond reach of normal human ken and, let's be honest, it was a great source of earthly power to be able to claim special access to God.

As a result, in some religions it became easy to simply add layer upon layer of speculation or sheer fantasy and claim it was part of that central dogma.

I think George is absolutely correct to say that for most people religious observance is about "practical religion" (my words) rather than the metaphysical speculation. They go along with the often impenetrable theology for the benefits in their everyday lives that derive from following the rules of behaviour.

Personal revelations on a scale grand enough to change the world are rare. It isn't surprising that those who have them are often venerated. It's even less surprising that they are often vilified in their own time.

Hi Craig,

>>Religions, including Christianity, … are the precursors to and the intellectual antecedents of modern science and philosophy and it is easy to show direct evolution from one to the other over time.<<

Here I beg to differ. Religion, especially Christianity acted until recently ALSO as a de facto substitute for what today is the realm of science (and to some extent also of modern philosophy). It is only this ersatz-function of religion that is the precursor of science and modern philosophy which "it is easy to show".

Religion, even its most primitive forms, is more than just a naive answer to scientific questions; it attempts to answer human beings’ existential questions that science cannot answer unless it masquerades as ersatz-religion. Its metaphysical interpretations concern only one of its dimensions.

Modern religion/theology deals with concepts (that for an atheist, as you rightly point out, have no reference to objective reality) that are beyond empirical verification either directly through senses or instruments or mathematical models, as concepts that science, notably physics, deals with.

As for dogmas, until Lobachevski, Bolyai also Euclid’s axioms were seen as “dogmas” i.e. basic, self-evident, truths that nobody doubted. Even today you must accept them as basic if you stick to Euclidean geometry.

>>it was a great source of earthly power to be able to claim special access to God.<<

This sounds like the ersatz technology function of religions in the past, or like mysticism that still thrives in spite of modern science and technology.

>>in some religions it became easy to simply add layer upon layer of speculation or sheer fantasy and claim it was part of that central dogma.<<

Until reletively recently also developments in pure mathematics were viewed by outsiders as adding “layer upon layer of speculation or sheer fantasy and claim it was part of” mathematics understood then only as arithmetics and elementary Euclidean geometry. Today some people look similarly at contemporary speculations in theoretical physics (M-theory, multiverse, etc.) I do not think these speculations are useless even when so far their usefulness is not visible.

Hi George,
Like theology, mathematics has at its heart the notion of internally self-consistent reasoning. Unlike religion, mathematics is self-consciously and deliberately abstract. Any correspondence with empirical reality is coincidental not purposeful: "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural world" as Wigner put it.

I think you'd agree that the history of maths has been one of endless striving for generality. Geometry on the plane is a special case of the more general geometry of the sphere, which is a special case of the more general geometry of curved surfaces, etc.

It's been an iterative evolutionary process over time that has revealed each of the more general cases, often only after a very lengthy period during which it has been necessary to accept as axiomatic the assumptions of the special case du jour.

Religion (especially the Abrahamic religions and most especially the fundamentalist sects) has somewhat quarantined the examination of some of the core axioms and that has been both an asset and a burden.

Speculation is not a problem per se, but when it is coupled with a theory of knowledge model in which only some forms of speculation are allowed and speculative results are regarded as unassailable dogma it is stultifying. Euclid arguably set back geometry by a millenium and Galen likewise for medicine, to give two non-religious examples.

Hi Craig,

I agree that one difference between mathematics and religion is that religion TRIES to understand reality within and without us, mathematics can only SERVE the latter, be it “coincidental” or “unreasonable”. Therefore logical constructions built on axioms (dogmas) are all that there is in mathematics, but not so in religion, not even the metaphysical dimension of it.

I agree that speculation is not a problem per se but even in science there is a difference between whether a theoretical physicist speculates about new outreaches of what is known, and whether somebody with a very limited knowledge and understanding of what is known tries to speculate to make things more comprehensible to him/her.

>> only some forms of speculation are allowed and speculative results are regarded as unassailable dogma it is stultifying.<<

This probably was so in the situation when one religion (e.g. Christianity) was the only (or default) cultural orientation (Christendom). This is not the case in the West any more: today there are no “dogmas” that everybody - interested or not in some theory of knowledge - has to accept.

Another thing are certain dogmas that might need to be explained/interpreted, but should NOT be explained away, when one wants to use the label e.g. Catholic when presenting a representation/model of reality (or morality). Compare this with my reference to the fifth Euclid’s axiom that became a “dogma” only for those doing Euclidean - in distinction to non-Euclidean - geometry, whereas before it was seen as an absolute truths about reality that everybody had to accept.

I do not think that Euclid set back geometry by a millennium, neither that Newton set back physics or Aquinas philosophy.