science vs religion
This is an open letter to address Moorpark College's "Year of Science and Religion." To preface this letter, I state five things: I love science. I am an atheist. I accept that people have views different from mine. My objective is to save scientific data from being diluted with magical answers. Moorpark College oversteps its bounds with this imposed entanglement of fact and fiction. Dear faculty, you opened a can of worms with this one. Your sly incorporation of theology with science will not go unopposed. Science will not give a millimeter to the theme of Intelligent Design, as it is the harbinger of a second Dark Age. Church and state are supposed to be separate, not that they ever were ("In God We Trust"), but they are supposed to be. It's frustrating to see the efforts of science ignored and compromised by a school stating its welter with mythology. By definition, science and religion are practically antonyms. Science is "the observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena;" a collective do-it-yourself pursuit of knowledge in which systematic research produces empirical information. Religion is defined as "social coherence based on a common group of beliefs or attitudes concerning an object, person, unseen being, or system of thought considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine or highest truth, and the moral codes, practices, values, institutions, and rituals associated with such belief;" the supposed dictum of a god, or gods, as mediated through a messiah declaring man was created as is by will alone and to look no further. This academic "Year of Science and Religion" is the dilution, corruption, and death of the science. It's a distorted attempt to persuade the impressionable that physical law and modern mythology are equally valid explanations of our universe. The credibility of the former is in the logical deduction of mathematical certainty and predictability of duplicable experimentation. Teach scientific facts and forgo the supernatural mysticism. General relativity defined our universe, and quantum mechanics furthers that endeavor toward a unified theory of profound understanding. Discovery by discovery, scientists affirm that religious explanations are highly improbable. Religion wrote itself into a corner where the malleable attempt to tack on new scientific insights and the unbelievably dense (fundamentalists) reject it outright. There is a new monument to this ignorance in Cincinnati, Ohio, called the Creation Museum. This "museum" lobs misinformation like feces and they actually have exhibits of man coexisting with dinosaurs, just like The Flintstones. Seriously, you are getting shit all over our lab coats. Throughout human history cultures have written tales to account for the mysteries of life, create a sense of protection, belonging, higher purpose, and set social guidelines for their herd to follow. For instance, Heaven and Hell was made up by the Greeks to convince their people that death in war could bring eternal bliss. Although Hinduism and Buddhism are less dogmatic than Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, they are still groundless accounts. No matter how many people believe in a god and regardless of what doctrine your parents subscribed to, religion will never hold validity in science. Your faith is irrelevant and you live in a detached reality. Leave it to religion to impose obligatory remorse and demand charity with blind loyalty. Eternal servitude to an omnipotent god who either does not care enough to mend his violent world, or simply isn't there. Maybe all the gods are preoccupied battling each other to be Champion Of The Universe! or something, just like their minions slaughter each other for worshiping the wrong god. So "God works in mysterious ways" and allows pedophiles to abduct kids like Camarillo's Amy Sue Seitz who was raped, skinned, murdered, and dumped in Topanga Canyon. So, where was your god? There are no devils, just appalling human behavior. This is the world we live in, hellish and heavenly. In such a dramatic place, it's no wonder the majority of the world needs supernatural justification. But we can find serenity in nature and a lifetime of love without mental detachment. As we gradually learn more of our world and universe through science, religions are left in obscurity and in need of explanation or modification. The Catholic Church had to come to terms with the fact that we do not live on a flat world, the Sun does not revolve around the Earth, and the irrefutable fossil evidence supporting evolution. Two hundred and fourteen years after Nicolas Copernicus' De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium ("On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres") was published [1543] the Catholic Church removed the formerly heretical book from their Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books") [1757]. It took three hundred and fifty-nine years for the Catholic Church to pardon [1992] the imprisonment of Galileo Galilei for his heliocentric studies [1633]. One hundred and thirty-seven years after the publishing of Charles Darwin's On The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection [1859], Pope John Paul II accepted evolution by stating it is not in conflict with The Holy Bible [1996]. Of course, their book doesn't say a word about single-celled organisms, dinosaurs, or early hominids so surely they cannot conflict. Same goes for planets, stars, black holes, quasars, galaxies, or one very important singularity. In more recent history, British physicist Stephen Hawking was requested to the Vatican to give a lecture on the Big Bang. Pope John Paul II then declared the Big Bang to be in accordance with The Holy Bible. It's fucking amazing that the scribes neglected to mention this, evidently they didn't know. They just documented "the voice of God" as their delusional, possibly schizophrenic, prophets dictated. Apparently it was a god with magic tricks that built a universe, one miniscule thing at a time. If it took God seven days to make our world, that motherfucker wouldn't be done with the universe. Ladies and gentlemen, witness the magic that is... Lord God the Magnificent! "Behold this ordinary clay as I shape it into *POOF* a man! Now watch closely as I take one rib and *POOF* a woman!" Creationists are as dim as their fabled inbred predecessors. Earth, and everything on in and around it, was not made in seven days, six thousand years ago. It's easier to just assimilate than to engage your mind in understanding causes and effects. And since your church cannot rationally explain the universe, I will. We got this shit down to a science. Thirteen billion seven hundred million years ago a singularity ignited our universe. This Big Bang released particles (protons, neutrons; [fermions] leptons: electron-neutrinos / electrons, muon-neutrinos / muons, tau-neutrinos / taus; quarks: up / down, charm / strange, top / bottom; [bosons] photons, gluons; mesons: pion / kaon / rho / b-zero / eta-c; gluons, [theoretically] gravitons, and corresponding anti-particles for every baryonic particle) and radiation (gamma rays, x-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light, microwaves, radiowaves). Three hundred thousand years later, the expanding universe cooled enough for the heavy particles to form atoms. Gravitational attraction accelerated hydrogen, helium, and lithium into thermonuclear reactions, which gave birth to the first stars. Gravity coalesced gas, dust, and stars to form galaxies. The supernova of a (Red Giant) star's implosion fuses and expels elements (helium, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, iron, and uranium) that later form planets and new stars. Four-and-a-half billion years ago our planet accreted out of gas and dust orbiting a third or fourth generation star in the outer arms of a spiral galaxy. In the habitable zone of this star system, planets Theia and Earth collided and formed a ring that would later compound into the Moon. Soon after Earth's volcanic environment settled, oceans and atmosphere formed. Self-replicating ribonucleic acid molecules evolved into deoxyribonucleic acid, which developed membranes to protect the biochemical reactions from the outside environment. Single cells branched into algae and protozoa, then protozoa into vertebrates and invertebrates. Shallow water fish adapted limbs for predatory maneuverability and eventually came ashore. Over millions of years, species continued to branch and develop into an increasingly complex variety of life. Dinosaurs ruled the planet for one hundred and sixty million years. Mass volcanism and drastic climate changes triggered deficiencies in the food chain and severely diminished the dinosaur population. Their extinction finally came with an asteroid collision in the Yucatan Peninsula. This impact raised a dark sky of dust and left the dwindling to die out. Small mammals survived to evolve into primates. Natural selection continued to vary and branch out to develop dominant hominids: Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapien. The former migrated out of Africa before the latter. Big brain outlive neanderthal with smart making. These glaring omissions confirm that holy books were written by people who had no supernatural dialog whatsoever, just the limited intelligence of an archaic people who perceived the Sun, Moon, and stars to revolve around a flat world. Religious texts are supposed to be written in stone, but doctrines must adapt or the religion will fall outdated and rest in history as mythology. We live in a time like no other. Science is the foundation of every necessity in modern lifestyles. Alarm clocks and water heaters utilize energies harnessed through science. Food and hygiene products are made available by the machines engineered from science. In such a time where technology is taken for granted the reliability of science goes unnoticed where it should be regarded as our best authority. It is through the scientific method that we have tangible observational and experimental evidence supporting theories like human and cosmological evolution. Around 1836 Charles Darwin studied birds on the Galapagos Islands. He found that certain finches adapted well to environmental changes and survived to reproduce those advantageous characteristics. The Galapagos Islands happened to be ideal for Darwin's research as the isolated ecosystem contributed to the variations in species. On a monthly and yearly timescale, one can observe the changes in species as they adapt to variables like food sources and weather conditions. In July of 2005 a news article was published detailing the discovery of a three hundred and eighty million-year-old tetrapod fish fossil found in Western Australia. This predates Homo sapiens (the ones "made in His image") by over three hundred and seventy-nine million years. This missing-link fossil, dubbed Gogonasus, was preserved in limestone and shows a remarkable amount of detail. The stout fish has four functioning limbs, a large predatory jaw, nostrils instead of gills, developing wrist joints, and (relatively) the same humerus, ulna, and radius bones found in Homo sapiens. This amazing and monumental discovery was grossly overshadowed by a news story that was released the very next day... the unveiling of a testament in The Holy Bible revealing that Judas did not betray Jesus. That's some goddamn devious timing. And no, God does not work for the Associated Press. German physicist Albert Einstein revolutionized science in 1905 and 1915 with his theories of special and general relativity. These physical laws detail the relationships between mass and energy, space and time, and light and gravity. With energy being equal to matter, laws of conservation are established and state matter cannot be created or destroyed (id est: creationism gets pwned). Einstein's theory was the foundation of the Manhattan Project that harnessed the immense power of nuclear fission in an atomic bomb [1945]. The hydrogen bomb was later developed utilizing nuclear fusion [1952] thereby controlling the power of the stars. In 1929 Edwin Hubble announced the joint discovery of a redshift in the light spectrum of observable galaxies. This indicated galaxies were moving away from each other. By calculating the velocity and distance, we find that all galaxies were once at a central point in spacetime, a singularity. This is the basis of the Big Bang theory and is supported by radiometric dating of meteorites and cosmic background microwave radiation. In 1971 astronomers were able to locate a gravitational monstrosity predicted by general relativity. The black hole, Cygnus X-1, was found by scouring the sky for binary stars that were both x-ray and visibly bright. (Black holes are formed from the implosion of stars over the Chandrasekhar Limit, and are defined by their singularity's gravitational intensity that distorts spacetime and prevents light from escaping its horizon. Supermassive black holes are the center of galaxies and presumably quasars.) All of these discoveries support the theories that bore them and declare truth of science. Believe whatever you want to believe, and don't take my word on faith. Roll up your sleeves and dig into any field of science. Read an objective, up-to-date, science book and you will see for yourself the step-by-step rationality that qualifies science as the most accurate definition of our universe. Religion is irrelevant to science because it is an Earth-based mythology, and such a fabrication should never violate the proximity of fact. Man created God as soon as the primitive mind could question death, and to argue otherwise is a vain attempt to hold onto ancient traditions that manifested grandeur with age. The Holy Bible, Quran, Sunna, Torah, Bhagavad-Gita, and Tipitaka are outdated books with fantastical stories passed off as allegory when common knowledge reaches new standards. The only valid debate regarding a supreme being in science is completely devoid of religion. Understand what a singularity is before claiming what might have preceded the one that birthed time. Only when we have a basic understanding of general relativity and quantum mechanics can we begin to speculate on the cause of the Big Bang. The Big Bang may have been caused by the explosion of a super-supermassive black hole in a greater universe. We could reside in a baby universe, formed from the disintegrated stars and worlds consumed by that super-supermassive black hole. There is a new cyclical model where Big Bangs infinitely contract with Big Crunches (this revived theory resolves the expansion acceleration problem with new insights on the properties of dark energy). Current studies of expansion indicate we may live in a multiverse, where many universes bubble up within each other. The physical laws of each universe would vary from one another, and inter-universe transmission is not possible. Our universe or multiverse could be self-contained, leaving no room or need for a creator; self-contained and boundless like the surface of the Earth. Spacetime is curved, and logically it might be spherical. This would account for how galaxies move away from us, analogous to the inflation of a balloon marked with dots, and all of the dots move away from each other. (Spacetime is difficult to visualize, so don't be misled by the Tron-like grid of embedding diagrams.) To quote Hawking, "There is no physical need for a beginning or end." We are all we are, everything is because it is, and the beauty of existence is mistaken as divine privilege. To assume we are the way we are because it was intended would be rather egocentric. We are but one result of endless evolutionary combinations; an inevitability of infinity in a multiverse. Realize that reversing any complex sequence to square one would depict high improbability. We may very well be the wrong side of the coin and surmise to be the right. Our universe is so incomprehensibly vast, so staggeringly, immensely and overwhelmingly colossal, that the probability of our civilization being the only one is nonexistent. According to Doctor Frank Drake's equation there should be thousands of civilizations in our very own galaxy. Civilizations advanced enough to broadcast communication signals and intelligent enough to survive nuclear adolescence. We have yet to make first contact on account of time and resources. On a cosmological timescale, our civilization is relatively new, so our presence would not yet be known. The only organization dedicated to sifting radiowaves for communication signals, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute, is independently funded and thus technologically restricted. SETI has evaluated eight hundred stars out as far as two hundred and fifty light-years (approximately two thousand trillion kilometers) of the Milky Way's minimum two hundred billion stars encompassing about ninety thousand light-years (approximately eight hundred and fifty thousand trillion kilometers). For each star SETI has evaluated, there are two hundred and fifty million more stars in our galaxy, and our galaxy is one of approximately one hundred twenty-five billion. This is to say, you are not special. No god conceived you, no angels watch over you, and "J.C." did not help you win your award. Jesus, or Yeshua bar Yahosef (Josh son of Joe), was presumably a philanthropic cult leader conceived naturally when his father, Yahosef, spajunkled in his wife, Miryam. Miss Virgin Mary (Miryam) very well may have been a virgin prior to the baby making as it was a strict religious demand of women, and by strict I mean stone-your-bride-to-death-on-her-father's-doorstep-if-she's-not-a-virgin strict. Yeshua rubbed the Romans the wrong way, was nailed to a cross, died, and decomposed. This shouldn't matter any more to anyone than the innumerable others executed throughout human history. Jesus fucking Christ! did anyone care to count how many African-American men, women, girls, and boys were brutally and unjustly lynched in the last two hundred years of United States history? This atrocity is far more hideous and relevant than one man with a fallacious title two thousand years ago. It is through science we gain understanding of our place in the universe, and it is the fault of religion for hindering the progress of our civilization. Science is firmly supported by multiple lines of tangible evidence, predictably replicable experiments, and incredibly precise theories proven to be highly reliable. Religion is based on primitive literature and maintains its hollow grandeur by a social majority that is convinced that their book originates from an invisible caretaker. Past milestones in science have been condemned as a heretical threat, even monks who questioned their religion were burned at the stake. And when human intelligence levels up, religions distort their failing legend to accommodate a new scientific fact. Science provides unbiased data to account for our civilization by means of cosmological and biological evolution, as well as the mathematical perspective of large scale probability and infinite inevitabilities. The tall tales of religion have never been able to support its creation stories, and exaggerate real life to the point of inducing mass alternate realities. Although religion may wish to include scientific facts, science will remain a concentrated and objective endeavor to know everything. Everyone is entitled to their own perception. However, in the study of natural phenomena, all beliefs must be set aside. Science and religion are two separate realities incapable of reconciliation, and if magic is injected into reason then the concept of fact is completely negated. So keep your bullshit mythology away from our science! Sincerely, Fellcoda
4 comments
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Ken Flanagan says:
Nice, but you forgot to state that evolution is still a theory. Fact is an unabtainable illusion.
posted Aug 14
whoa rawket. says:
ok first of all, when this thing said somthing about ,where was you God then? God didnt make the world perfect. every thing happens for a reason weather you know that reason or not, so when some one dies or gets hurt, it might be becuse of our sinful nature. God is not going to make the world perfect becuse that is for heaven, and becuse if there are athiest then why do they deserve to have his perfect world that he created if they dont even belive in him.
oh wait! and if we came from other animals, then how come those animals are still not having people? or people having animals? or mabey half bird have person...
and if you really think about it the bible could totaly be true.
the Nohas ark thing, how do you think the fossiles got there?
and just so many things in the bible could not be thought out by any genious no matter how smart you are. try reading it and it will all fit together. and if you ask ' well where did God come from' if you ask that why dont you ask where people came from? "monkeys?dogs? whatever you think. then where did those animals come from? it could go on and on. but you belive what you want to and we will belive what we want to. way to take advantage of the FREE WILL God gave to us. man you dont even know the mercy God has for us. and the love.
and you say mock us saying *poof* but bang is just as crazy!
and i also tottlay agree with Mark, the language you use is not very scinentific. it sounds immature and childish(no offence) but mabey if you want to explain this more, try cutting out the swear words, people will NOT take you serious.
and i am sorry if i offended you at all.
posted May 12
Mark McAlister says:
Your entire rebuttle would sound far more intelligent if you didnt employ the "intelligent dialogue-profanity laced church bashing-intelligent dialogue-profanity laced church bashing format". A a youth pastor, and philosophy major, i have done much reading into the orgins of the universe, and you obviously know your stuff, but i found myself having to skip portions of your rebuttle because i couldn't even stomach some of the hateful-disrespectful things you were saying about my faith. It was quite honestly a fabulous piece to read, but completely ruined by language that turned from graduate school to truck stop, and opinions that turned from educated and well stated to emotional and hurtful, much like most of teh religous radicals that you obvioulsy take issue with.
posted Apr 26
Pages: 1 (4 total comments)
Ken Flanagan says:
So without getting religious, I do pose a question.
If the laws and boundaries of scientific expression dictate an irrational order to that existace of a universe without organization, and the common law that matter and being go from order to chaos, and in conjunction can we then assume that matter cannot be created of destroyed only changed in form, then from these basic assumtions, then will we find the contradiction in existace itself?
If we have existace of matter without its begining we must find its catylist, and therefore the catylist must be its creator.
From order to Chaos. "From" dictates a start. "To" dictates a direction. "Order" dictates organization and process. "Chaos" dictates a negative impending change.
So then we ask, what is the catylist?
posted Aug 14