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God n Science

TheMadFool June 03, 2018 at 07:20 6500 views 13 comments
From a cursory observation we see that most ''great'' scientific discoveries have been made by people who believe in God i.e in the period 16th to the 19th centuries.

Nothing much has been achieved since then.

Could it be that our loss of faith is ''causing'' a failure in our ability to discover new truths about our world?

Your views...

Comments (13)

Dalai Dahmer June 03, 2018 at 07:38 #184896
Reply to TheMadFool I think the God club was just bigger back then. I think the penalties for not at least pretending to be in the club were quite severe..

Txastopher June 03, 2018 at 08:19 #184905
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.
TheMadFool June 03, 2018 at 08:59 #184915
Quoting Dalai Dahmer
I think the God club was just bigger back then. I think the penalties for not at least pretending to be in the club were quite severe..


My knowledge on history isn't so good but I doubt that early scientists were ''pretending'' to believe in God.

If I may say so, their works were considered as deciphering the word of God.
TheMadFool June 03, 2018 at 09:01 #184916
Quoting Txastopher
Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.


Really? It's just a coincidence? Could be...never know. However one can't miss the fact that this generation is missing the luminaries that populated the scientific community a few centuries ago.
TheMadFool June 03, 2018 at 09:55 #184927
1901 – Annie Jump Cannon: stellar classification
1905 – Albert Einstein: theory of special relativity, explanation of Brownian motion, and photoelectric effect
1906 – Walther Nernst: Third law of thermodynamics
1907 – Alfred Bertheim: Arsphenamine, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent
1909 – Fritz Haber: Haber Process for industrial production of ammonia
1909 – Robert Andrews Millikan: conducts the oil drop experiment and determines the charge on an electron
1910 – Williamina Fleming: the first white dwarf, 40 Eridani B
1911 – Ernest Rutherford: Atomic nucleus
1911 – Heike Kamerlingh Onnes: Superconductivity
1912 – Alfred Wegener: Continental drift
1912 – Max von Laue : x-ray diffraction
1912 – Vesto Slipher : galactic redshifts
1912 – Henrietta Swan Leavitt: Cepheid variable period luminosity relation
1913 – Henry Moseley: defined atomic number
1913 – Niels Bohr: Model of the atom
1915 – Albert Einstein: theory of general relativity – also David Hilbert
1915 – Karl Schwarzschild: discovery of the Schwarzschild radius leading to the identification of black holes
1918 – Emmy Noether: Noether's theorem – conditions under which the conservation laws are valid
1920 – Arthur Eddington: Stellar nucleosynthesis
1922 – Frederick Banting, Charles Best, James Collip, John Macleod: isolation and production of insulin to control diabetes
1924 – Wolfgang Pauli: quantum Pauli exclusion principle
1924 – Edwin Hubble: the discovery that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies
1925 – Erwin Schrödinger: Schrödinger equation (Quantum mechanics)
1925 – Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Discovery of the composition of the Sun and that Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe
1927 – Werner Heisenberg: Uncertainty principle (Quantum mechanics)
1927 – Georges Lemaître: Theory of the Big Bang
1928 – Paul Dirac: Dirac equation (Quantum mechanics)
1929 – Edwin Hubble: Hubble's law of the expanding universe
1928 – Alexander Fleming: Penicillin, the first beta-lactam antibiotic
1929 – Lars Onsager's reciprocal relations, a potential fourth law of thermodynamics
1930 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovers his eponymous limit of the maximum mass of a white dwarf star
1932 – James Chadwick: Discovery of the neutron
1932 – Karl Guthe Jansky discovers the first astronomical radio source, Sagittarius A
1934 – Clive McCay: Calorie restriction extends the maximum lifespan of another species
1938 – Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann: Nuclear fission
1938 – Isidor Rabi: Nuclear magnetic resonance
1943 – Oswald Avery proves that DNA is the genetic material of the chromosome
1945 - Howard Florey Mass production of penicillin
1947 – William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain invent the first transistor
1948 – Claude Elwood Shannon: 'A mathematical theory of communication' a seminal paper in Information theory.
1948 – Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Freeman Dyson: Quantum electrodynamics
1951 – George Otto Gey propagates first cancer cell line, HeLa
1952 – Jonas Salk: developed and tested first polio vaccine
1952 - Frederick Sanger: demonstrated that proteins are sequences of amino acids
1953 – James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin: helical structure of DNA, basis for molecular biology


All born in the 1800s.

The rest of the list is made of people who only ''confirm'' what had been theorized by people who believed in a god.
Dalai Dahmer June 03, 2018 at 10:43 #184934
Quoting TheMadFool
My knowledge on history isn't so good but I doubt that early scientists were ''pretending'' to believe in God


I can see your history is wanting by the reply you had from ?????????????.

You doubt that I I don't doubt that. Well that's that covered then.Quoting TheMadFool
If I may say so, their works were considered as deciphering the word of God.


Yeah sure. Their works were considered, therefore by others, as deciphering those same other's already belief-in-god club-minded view. It's to be expected.



Hanover June 03, 2018 at 11:56 #184952
Quoting TheMadFool
Could it be that our loss of faith is ''causing'' a failure in our ability to discover new truths about our world?


Assuming your hypothetical true, that most scientific discoveries were made by religious people, there is no basis to conclude there is any causative link between those two facts, considering as you move back in time most people were religious. I'd assume that as the stove top hat fell into disuse, you saw the same changes occur in scientific discovery, but I doubt one had to do with the other.

As a somewhat relevant aside, the hypothetical is false as well. Technological advances are occuring at a faster pace now.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2015/06/17/the-quickening-pace-of-medical-progress-and-its-discontents/amp/
Rank Amateur June 03, 2018 at 13:49 #184999
And since the rise is mass produced ice cream, there have been giant leaps in computer science. Therefore ice cream lovers make better computers.
TheMadFool June 04, 2018 at 07:16 #185184
Reply to Dalai Dahmer Reply to ????????????? Reply to Hanover Reply to Rank Amateur

Let me present this from a psychological perspective....

Belief in God is, in essence, a culmination of the ''sense of wonder'' - a key ingredient in any form of inquiry.

Do you agree, ergo, that this ''sense of wonder'' spreads into all quests for knowledge? God, in my view, provides a stronger motivation for us.
Dalai Dahmer June 04, 2018 at 09:29 #185213
Reply to TheMadFool

I see what you are mired within now.
Wayfarer June 04, 2018 at 09:56 #185220
Quoting TheMadFool
Nothing much has been achieved since then.


Hanover June 04, 2018 at 10:36 #185228
Reply to TheMadFool Your thesis that the religious are more creative than the non-religious isn't a philosophical theory, it's an empirical one that requires a firmer definition of "creative" to be tested. I can't say though that I've noticed that the artistic crowd is particularly religious. Really it seems much the opposite.
TheMadFool June 05, 2018 at 14:05 #185704
Quoting Dalai Dahmer
I see what you are mired within now.


Yes but you're being vague. Can you please be specific.

Quoting Hanover
Your thesis that the religious are more creative than the non-religious isn't a philosophical theory, it's an empirical one that requires a firmer definition of "creative" to be tested. I can't say though that I've noticed that the artistic crowd is particularly religious. Really it seems much the opposite.


Well, we agree on some points. It's just a hunch but it's not that difficult to see that religion is tied somehow to mysticism. Mysticism is the icing on the cake of the mysterious - that is the ultimate prompt for all inquiry.

Reply to Wayfarer Nice video. Thanks.

Reply to ????????????? Have a read above. I'm not saying religion is true but only ponder on it as a very strong and very positive (morally) impetus for discovery - real groundbreaking discoveries.