The Relationship Between Science and Religion

VIDEO DESCRIPTION

Steven Pinker talks about the connection between science and religion. He also talks about the purpose of humankind and secular enlightenment.

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The Relationship Between Science and Religion bigthink purpose humankind science religion connection secular enlightenment steven pinker understanding religion understanding universeThe Relationship Between Science and Religion

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

I think that using the word God or the attitude of faith towards that which you do not know is a compound. It is a way of slapping a label on something rather than trying to understand it. Or, since we may not understand everything, we just say there is something that we do not understand.

To invent stories that sounds as if they were true or could be true, to pretend that they are true just that we can have a story, I think it is unsatisfying and it could even be immoral because it could lead you to a mistaken policies, to getting in the way of your best understanding of how the world works to doing things that could lead to more harm than good and the concrete example would be treating a cancer with some cochlear, or herbal or homeopathic formula instead of the best medicine that we have or justifying invasions and murders and sacrifices on the grounds, pissing some God or carrying out some divine mandate but there is nothing but mischief that can come from inventing stories that which we do not understand. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “There’s to some things that we do not understand.”

There are some questions that may do not have answers because they are bad questions. Something question like why is there is something rather than nothing. It may just be a stupid question. The question of “Why am I here? Why was I put here? What is my greater purpose?” It might be like that.

Given that I am here, I do think that I have an ethical imperative to be good to other people, to put my life to some purpose that I can define like understanding the world better, helping the other people. I may taking the best advantage of pay the gifts that I find myself with. But some cosmic reason is the “Why me?” It seems to be kind of arrogant or egotism. Why should the cosmos care about me? That is seems to be the height of grandiosity to think that it would.

One of the things that I think science shows us is that the idea there are some purpose to the universe. It is one that we should outgrow. There’s a purpose to each one of our lives. And we can articulate what that purposes and why we have it but why humans emerge on earth? Why there is a planet earth? Why the universe does what it does and we got to outgrow these questions. It is very clear that there is no purpose in that sense.

The fact that the sun will expand and consume the entire earth, that the universe might blow apart, that 99% species go instinct and be kind of arrogant to say that Homo Sapiens will be the only one that doesn’t. The fact that the earth is one out of presumably thousands of millions and billions of planets that could support life that there is nothing particularly distinguish them about our solar system. All of those realizations say that the idea that we were put here for some purpose is a kind of medieval ignorance and arrogance. That does not mean that, we humans, with the brains that we have, with our understanding of what we value and don’t have a purpose.

And in many ways there is a kind of fulfillment of human purposes that is going on through history. Owing to the cumulative efforts of humans to make something of their life, to achieved something worthwhile. We know more, it’s astonishing how much we do know, there is lots of we do not know. But the fact that we know the genetic code of life, that we know how old the universe is, that we know how the earth formed, that we know the basic of constituents of chemistry—this is mind bugling stuff.

People in the 17th century would have given up anything for glimpse of what we know today, that is something to celebrate. The fact that we gotten less violent overtime, we no longer have human sacrifices. We take out slavery in most to the world, we no longer have a capital punishment for trivial crimes. We do not have a multi-torture, burning of the steak, disemboweling crucifixion. The number of wars has gone down in the last 50 years. By many measures, we have become a less violent species. Not because there is some force in the universe pushing us in that direction but I think because we recognize the futi