No Fundamental Distinction Between Science and Religion

But, i will.

I see the quest of knowledge in him. But, for some reasons, He cannot stand critism and have the impression that he knows too much and nothing but truth. He gets impatient every easily and that forces him to make the same mistake again and again. Moreover, he tends to enjoy insulting others. He crosses the limit of critism and enters into the unwarrented teritory of personal accusations and that too in not a decent language and tone. He is very fond of using words like fool, stupid absurd etc. That gives him the satisfaction of some sort of a winner.

with love,
sanjay

Your uncollected and vague thinking exemplifies the difference between science and religion.
It is in the nature of the beast that those who promote faith are blind to reason; but those who promote reason can see the faults in faith.
You are of the former category and whilst you persist in relying on faith you will remain blind to the truth.

Although, as I said above, there are some practitioners in science who poorly appreciate the differences and bring faith to bear where it ought not to belong, history has proven that the results so gathered have not stood the test of time. Science cannot and does not progress on faith.

I haven’t been followng the conversation, but I disagree with this and I think it’s a pretty important point. The notion that sensing requires reasoning is a mistake that Hume made (and maybe others before him) that created a lot of problems- you end up with skepticism and Berkeleyian idealism as a consequence of people trying to figure out what it is to reason from a sense perception to the conclusion that there is a thing being perceieved.

So for example. Suppose I walk into a room that is decorated just so, and form the conclusion that a birthday party was recently held there.  One could take the view that my brain is forming beliefs and reasonings of the following forms:

“I see a plastic cup- therefore there is a plastic cup.”
“I see another plastic cup- therefore there is another plastic cup.”
“I see a scattering of plastic cups- therefore there are probably many plastic cups before me, signifying that many people drank many things here.”

“I see a chocolate cake- therefore there is probably a chocolate cake before me.”
"I see that the chocolate cake has pieces missing- therefore there are probably pieces missing.
“Therefore somebody probably ate portions of the cake.”
“I see a banner strung from the ceiling saying ‘Happy 45th, Steve’, therefore…”
…
…
…
…
…
“Given the truth of the majority of these presumptions, the most likely conclusion is that a birthday party happened here.”

And so on, about say, the 150 or so things present in our immediate field of vision, and combinations thereof. I would submit that this is a highly unrealistic presentation of how we percieve reality, unless we are a child or perhaps a mildly retarded person. I think a fully-functioning human being would walk into the room, and accept that the room as a whole is presenting in a birthday party sort of way, and conclude immediately that a birthday party happened- the “I see it, therefore it is there” premises about individual objects would be totaly absent; in this case seeing simply is believing. We need seeing to be believing to react quickly to things we see- catching a ball, avoiding danger.
I would go on to say that somebody who sees a LOT of birthday parties- like say a cleaning lady at a hotel that rents out convention rooms or whatever- would even skip that last premise. A room in which a birthday party had occured would appear as immediately to her as a cup sitting on table appears to us.

 Hume's mistake was to presume that everything required reasoning- if I see a thing, in order to believe a thing is there, there must be some good rational argument from the presentations of vision to conclusions about the outside world.  This is false.  A conclusion about the outside world is a [i]part of[/i] the act of seeing, and need not be justified in terms of reasoning any more than a logical argument needs to be justified in terms of sense perception.  They are simply two different faculties which [i]can be[/i] used in tandem, but with neither relying on the other.

Besides your nimbo-jumbo, you did not address my points.

And, you chose to ignore this.

I never claimed that science progressed on faith. I was saying that it was faithful people who helped the science all along the history. Their faith in the religions did not forbid them to study and making further inroads in the science.

But, your ego is letting you to accept this obvious fact, because in that case, you will lose reason to demean religions, which is your first and formost priority.

with love,
sanjay

Seriously?
Anyone who doesn’t realize his reasoning is a sucker for deceit; magic, skewed statistics, pseudo-science, attention deficit disorder, thievery, false flags,…

You walk into a room and you DON’T see a picture on the wall.

Using no reasoning whatsoever, answer this question: “How do you know if there is a picture on the wall?”

The phrase is mumbo-jumbo.
You did not make any points. Reasonable thinking leads to points. All you did was to display your innards across the Forum in the guise of a diatribe based on faith, and not reason. Therefore no other response was required.

The state or government is nothing more than a fictional secular version of God via social organization.

Government like all religions claim a monopoly on objectivity.

With government ruling all aspects of people’s lives it has assumed godhood.

Politics and economics is the religion of the state.

Science of course is just another form of alchemy.

All religions need their practicing alchemists.

[i]Knowledge[/i] requires reasoning.  The point I was responding to was the assertion that direct observation (which I am taking to mean sense perception resulting in belief formation) requires reasoning. It does not.  When a person has a tree-seeing experience (is appeared to treely), and forms the belief that there is a tree in front of them, the belief is an immediate consequence of being so appeared to, not a product of the appearance plus some conscious reasoning about what appearences mean. 

 You walk into a room and don't see a picture on the wall.  You don't form a belief that there is a picture on the wall- this isn't a reasoning process, it's an absence of a process. Somebody asks you "How do you know if there is a picture on the wall?"; you have to think about it [i]then[/i] and give an answer.  But then we're talking about a reasoning process brought about by the question, not by sense perception.

I have to accept that you are speaking of merely cognitive reasoning. Beliefs are often formed by unconscious reasoning. Not much of the population exercises cognitive reasoning, “thinking”. But then we are actually talking about the evidence involved in science and the associated reasoning. Without cognitive reasoning, it can’t be science at all. Cognitive reasoning is what allows for communication and verification of speculations (aka “science”).

So it is really an issue of credible evidence, not presumed beliefs. Evidence accepted yet not questioned is not credible evidence. One cannot be certain that his evidence is credible until he reasons that it is credible.

But even on the subconscious level, what you sense as “belief” is actually the result of subconscious reasoning. If the subconscious cannot use its reasoning to form a belief, there will not be any belief presented to the conscious. To the subconscious, there was no evidence with which to form a belief. And even on the unconscious level, all sensing (the source of evidence) is the result of actual reasoning, such as “because this particular nerve was triggered, something touched my arm” or "because light appeared at this point on my retina, light is being emitted from that point in space".

There is reasoning on every level of “evidence” else that level of mind does not accept even a belief.

I know that and it was not a typing mistake this time. I did that intentionally to check how you react to that.

LM,

This is called escapism. You are just unable to counter anything, that i argued so far. So, you are saying this to save your face.

Let me put that question again to you-

LM, try to address the arguments, if you can.

Mere rhetoric is not sufficient. It can be handy and adds to the beauty of the argument but only if there is some reasoning behind that. Rhetoric is like the icing of the cake but you cannot make full cake with it. Nobody is going to eat that.

with love,
sanjay

Some scientist may have had faith along the way, but most people are luckily about to separate faith as fiction from fact from reason.
But I think you need a history lesson.
The Roman EMpire was home to the Greek philosophers and the site of the worlds repository of the greatest body of knowledge until Christianity. Until justinian shut down the Schools of philosophy: Epicureanism and Stoicism became heresy.
This plunged Europe and North Africa into a intellectual dark age.
The same thing happened in “Islam”, and fundamentalist Islam grew the Arab nations that had ben the repository of all the lost knowledge was about to suffer the same fate. And by the end of the 12thC nearly all investigation into science was over.
Some of the texts of the ancient thinkers had been preserved, but had to wait until the schism of religious thought the Reformation which enabled the re-discovery of some of the old knowledge party through their preservation in Arab private libraries.
THis together with the invention of printing revolutionised the transmission of knowledge to a degree that the religious authorities were no longer able to control it, as they had done for over a thousand years.
It was never a guiding force for anything but suffering, and ignorance.

Knowledge does not come though faith.
I can have faith is X, but that means I cannot progress with it, To grow you must reject faith, and open your eyes to justifiable reality.
A person with red hair can ride a bike. But that does not mean that bike riding comes thought the possession of red hair. You need to think a bit more clearly about your notion.
Faith is an impediment to reason, by definition.
The enlightenment was that moment when faith was put aside and people dared to think for themselves. You are in a state of extreme delusion. All the great thinkers of the time were atheists and deist, who had rejected faith, despite that being illegal and putting themselves in danger of prosecution and prejudice. Diderot, D’Alembert, David Hume, John Smith, L’Mettrie, Rouseau, Montesquieu, Franklin, Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Pierrre Bayle, Baruch Spinoza, Giambatista, Schiller, Goetre, Beethoven.
THe list is endless.
Before you can learn you need to shuffle off Faith. Before you can think about something new, you need to give up something that is not true, if you have faith that a thing is true and you have arrived at a belief through faith rather than reason you are unable to do this, except by loosing your faith.

If we had had no religion science would have been a thousand years more progressed. Because it was religion that shut down the schools of philosophy and controlled knowledge dogmatically for a over a thousand years, making it a come of heresy to object to.
These are the facts.
And since Islam took control of North African and the Middle East it has produced NOT ONE significant contribution to science, until secular values were reintroduced.

These are not facts. These are your speculations.

I agree entirely with your post; reasoning is a conscious/semi-conscious process that can be linguistically followed, which much of manifest existence clearly isn’t. But this last paragraph confuses me - Hume explicitly and forcefully argued against the rationalist view of reason’s primacy. That’s what he did; that’s most of what he did, and is famous for, philosophically. That you don’t deduce that the sun will rise tomorrow, but accept it as a regularity of sensation. Why do you choose him as the standard bearer?

Also: “a mistake that Hume made (and maybe others before him) that created a lot of problems- you end up with skepticism and Berkeleyian idealism”. Berkeley wrote before Hume was born, so even if your criticism holds, definitely others before him

It is a totally false understanding of Hume.

Mine or his? Do you have an argument, or just a declaration?

That depends whether or not your agreement extends to his caricature of Hume, or you were just agreeing with the rest of the statement. Hume did not make that presumption. Sensible qualities are impressed on our thought, reason is a process we choose to apply to our impressions.

I believe 'unconscious reasoning' to be an oxymoron.  Certainly beliefs are formed from time to time by unconscious processes, but to call those processes reasoning makes no sense to me. 
 So for example, I throw a ball, and a dog catches it. The ball is moving at a certain speed, describing a certain arc, to end up in a certain place at a certain time, and the dog puts his mouth precisely where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.  Would you say that dog performed [i]unconscious trigonometry?[/i] I would not.  Dogs don't know trig. For that matter, neither did the person throwing the ball in this example.  The dog certainly had some sort of unconscious process that put his mouth where it needs to be, but I don't see why it has to be parallel to the process a person would go through if they were consciously working it out as a math problem.

If I were in the 16th century, I might agree with you. But these days, we know far, far more about how a brain and mind function in order to accomplish what they do. And yes, I really would say that the subconscious performs that “trigonometry”, but in its own terms.

Mathematics is a cognitive language for the conscious mind. The sub- and unconscious mind doesn’t use that language except in extraordinary cases. The unconscious mind uses inherent logic applied to its limited perception and the subconscious mind uses comparative rationality to aim toward a goal. Both can be reduced to probability and statistics, but not using the language of mathematics, merely the effects of assessing a perceived situation from one step to the predicted next step, which is all mathematics does. Both are cases of reasoning. They both perform the function of intelligence to accomplish a life supporting goal, merely using different languages and methods.

Relating to the process of awareness / consciousness there are two „ways“: b[/b] the way from semiotical, linguistical operations to logical (philosophical), mathematical operations, b[/b] the way from mathematical operations to logical (philosophical), linguistical, semiotical operations.

Some of the non-human living beings have consciousness, but they have a very much smaller brain and less consciousness than the human beings have. Only human beings have such very, very complex conscious systems, especially the linguistical, the logical (philosophical), and the mathematical system. Let’s say that some of the non-human living beings have a pre-consciousness because the diffrence betwenn their consciousness and the consciousness of the human beings is too large.

An example:

A lioness „instinctively »knows«“ how much cubs she has. When one or more of them are lost, she realises it, but she can’t count like humans can. At first the lioness „goes“ the conscious „way 1“ without any linguistical and logical operations (see above), thus from the semiotical operations (sign: „lost cubs“) to the mathematical operation („all cubs – missing cubs“), and then she „goes“ the conscious „way 2“ without logical and linguistical operations (see above), thus from the mathematical operations (for example: 7 – 2 = 5) to the semiotical operation (sign: „less cubs“). The mathematics in the brain of the lioness works but she doesn’t „consciously »know«“ that it works.

Another example:

A predator must be able to calculate the „worth“ of attacking a prey If it is not profitable or even too dangerous, it is better to protect oneself and to gather forces. A predator with a broken leg can hardly catch a prey; a predator with a broken lower jaw can hardly eat a prey: a predator without a tongue can hardly drink. Predators must „instinctively »know«“ much about their environment and their skills, their risks, what is possible and what is too dangerous.

In order to survive the non-human living beings don’t need such a complex brain, such a complex awareness / consciousness, especially such complex systems of language (linguistics) and logic (philosophy), as the human beings have. Human beings are luxury beings.

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Human beings can say: „I don’t want to eat today because tomorrow or later I am going to eat a Sacher torte“. The evolution of the luxury beings means the process of winning more and more luxury at the cost of losing more and more instincts, means becoming less and less beings of adaptation to the environment but more and more beings of alienation, of insulation. Nevertheless, human beings are also predators, but they are luxury predators because they are luxury beings.

To me it is all about like arguing if a calculator or computer “uses logical deduction”, “thinks”, and/or “knows the answer”. It is all just how you want to define the words and concepts. As far as I am concerned, the method for deduction and intelligence is pretty irrelevant to the concern of whether something is actually deducing, reasoning, or responding intelligently. They all get the task of reasoning done, by whatever means they do it else none of them would survive at all. Without any type of reasoning, an animal wouldn’t even be able to see, breath, eat, or walk.