Some people are of the opinion that belief and scientific progress are incompatible or belief hinders/stunt/impairs scientific progress.
Could we please have clear definitions of what these people mean when they say:
Also, which beliefs would they consider to be incompatible with scientific progress. And if any, which beliefs do they think would be compatible with scientific progress.
maybe ‘belief’ is the wrong word…rather ‘faith’ or to put it in the correct context, the imperative to ‘have faith’. A Rabbi spoke on the TV the other day. He said he wishes people would stop ‘believing’! The interviewer was shocked and then the rabbi explained: “When you say ‘I believe it will rain tomorrow’, you are not sure that it will, faith is required when you are uncertain of something”. Of course his message was that there is certainty in his particular God.
Faith and certainty are mutally exclusive concepts; scientific progress requires belief in your knowledge and the structure of your research. The very formulation of a hypotheses is stating certain possible outcomes or non-outcomes that are uncertain until proven. Stating which beliefs are compatible is opening a whole new troll >:D
This thread is about belief, not faith ;).
I don’t see the difference. Saying: “I believe it will rain tomorrow” and saying " I have faith that it will rain tomorrow" are synonymous? and neither of those statements would be based on scientific fact. :-\
A couple of names of victims of ‘belief’ come to mind: Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for ‘heresy’ Giordano Bruno - Wikipedia; Galileo and Copernicus (who feared the eccliasistical jitteriness between Catholic and Protestant beliefs of his time); Aristarchus of Samos (310 - 230 BC) who was vilified by Cleanthus for ‘impiety’ according to Plutarch head of the Stoic School).
During the Dark Ages, it took over 400 years for al-Khowarizmi’s (guess where the word algorithm comes from ;D) treatise called “Treatise on Cipher” to be translated into Latin while it took another 200 years for the Hindu-Arabic numeration system with the zero, to become widely diffused in Europe.
You can work out what belief systems impaired/delayed/hindered/stunted scientific progress for yourself.
Scientific ones.
You mean testable, repeatable ones? Surely not?
Yeah, the disprovable kind. 
recently read this over at rationalskepticism - the life boat when dawkinsnet went under.
[i]There are certain words that have subtle qualitative differences in nuance of meaning, depending on context. ‘Belief’ and ‘faith’ are among those kinds of words… and the differences are profound, both in their direct meaning and in the implications of those differences.
In ordinary discourse, ‘belief’ is generally taken to be an expression of opinion… the idea that “I think that’s true.” But in the context of ‘god’ and ‘religion’, it doesn’t mean that at all. In THAT context, ‘belief’ represents the certainty that one possesses or has access to profound and absolute ‘truth’… ‘knowledge’… pertaining to vital aspects of existence and reality. This ‘certainty’ is internalized to the extent that it becomes a vital component of one’s ‘self-description’, and functions as a primary interpretive ‘filter’, whose output represents ones conceptualization of reality.
That’s quite a bit different from “I think that’s true.”
In this context, ‘belief’ is essentially the ILLUSION of knowledge… a lame and pathetic substitute for actual knowledge. Such ‘belief’ is sustained by ‘faith’… wishful, magical thinking… an lame and pathetic substitute for facts, evidence, logic, reason, and critical thinking.
Put kindly, we can say that faith + belief —> bamboozlement.
Put honestly, we can say that faith + belief —> gullibility, self-deception, self-delusion, willful ignorance, intellectual dishonesty, lies, deceit, sophistry, hypocrisy, and toxic, drooling, malignant stupidity.
We often hear preachers saying things like “Do you have faith that the airplane that’s going to carry you home will not crash? Do you have faith that the chair you’re sitting in is not going to collapse under you? Do you believe that the sun is going to rise tomorrow? Do you believe in the fidelity of your spouse? Well then… have faith, and believe that the Lord loves you, and will guide you.” Then the flock gets all tingly with warm fuzzy feelings of religious ecstasy… waves their hands and yells “Hallelujah. Praise Jeeeeezus”… not having the slightest clue that they’re being manipulated and bamboozled by the same lack of perception, awareness and subtlety of thought that you have just exhibited for us.[/i]
Which I think encapsulates this quite well.
Thanx Cyghost…that’s essentially what I was trying to say at the outset.
To digress for a moment…
When I think of science vs. religion/faith, I always somehow in my head immediately get this picture of an island in the ocean. Religion is the island, science is the ocean. Every now and then, the ocean rises. At that point the island gets a little bit smaller, but there’s still some room left to stand. In my view, the island has been shrinking for a long time, and it’s foolhardy to think that it’ll gain new ground, the ocean is rising steadily and eventually the island will have little room left to stand. However, we may never see a day that it’s completely submerged.
Religions have made many claims about reality that have been submerged under the never-relenting tide of science, in some quarters are still the odd nut shouting “the earth is flat”, but in the real world the “perfect” texts have been caught in the act of making shit up far too often. People too easily assume that certain things will never be disproved by science, they are not the first people in history to incorrectly hold that belief, and they won’t be the last. It’s one of the things I recognized early in my initial doubts about religion, and an observation I held as key for abandoning the island. Another key in it was this: If science is the toolkit of truth, and religion was not compatible with that toolkit (you can’t apply science to prove or disprove religion), it meant something was awry, since so much else that wasn’t compatible with science had already been (excluding religion in my young mind at the time) concluded as false. It was time to face facts: I was the one being inconsistent, and not seeing the obviousness of the problem: When would science get around to shrinking my “now smaller island” version of religion? And if I simply clung to my shrinking island, what was going to be left to cling to? The chance that my island would just keep shrinking indefinitely, probably after my own death? To do that would be intellectually dishonest, plus I would die believing some bit of the island that people would prove as false after my death… since I was being intellectually dishonest in clinging to something just because science hadn’t “reached” that point yet.
I realize the discussion here is more about the meaning of the word “belief” and that it’s not “faith”. But teleo can argue semantics all he wants, I believe (in the rational sense), that in religion vs. science, it’s only science that has a viable chance of making headway here, and at key points in history, comes into stark opposition to religion (so much so that the religious fire up the torches and braai people). I hope we will come to a point where the god hypothesis is falsifiable, and falsified. How that would happen I don’t know, but people didn’t think it was possible to prove the world is round, or that evolution happens. The only thing they’ve done consistently, is be wrong, a lot.
Nice metaphor BM, however the religionist would probably state that the island is a volcano waiting to erupt, driving away all the water and establishing a new Nirvana-like land. (wtf!!)
The intellectual dishonesty has been sold to the world in the guise of religions for centuries and as we all know it’s not sustainable unless accompanied by threats of hell etc and nice promises that they are unable to deliver on. All science can do is to constantly decrease the size of the island not because it exists but because science has a task greater than that!
Boogie, I think you have several misconceptions about religion, science and the history of both as well as the so-called “conflict” between faith and reason…
Firstly, and I hope you agree with me here, science, together with philosophy, are about discovering truths about reality. The truth of how things operate and why. Science also deals with causes. When I think of faith held by many scientists, it is the faith in the reliability of human kind’s intellectual endeavours and ability to one day fully grasp and understand the physical world. There is no evidence this will one day happen but we have faith.
Secondly, I think your metaphor is flawed from my perspective (obviously :P). I simply don’t think there is a conflict between science and faith. Instead, science and faith are part of the same island and the ocean is the vast physical world and all its secrets and scientific discoveries that still needs to be discovered. Each new discovery makes the island bigger and better equipped to deal with the mysteries of the universe and simultaneously increases faith not only in the scientific endeavour itself, but also the belief that this vast physical world is not meaningless and purposeless, but created and sustained. Whether the universe has exists for eternity or not is irrelevant.
Thirdly, do yourself a favour and read God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. Here is a good review (by an atheist nogal). Hopefully this will lay to rest many misconceptions about so-called conflicts between reason and faith during the middle-ages and thereafter.
Fourthly, God is not some kind of scientific hypothesis or theory. God is also not there to just explain mysteries while science explains the rest. Again, this is simply a false dichotomy. From a classical theistic point of view, all things that are known (via science or otherwise) as well as unknown (mysteries we have yet to unravel) naturally exist because of God. That is why science and faith are not in conflict since science increases our understanding of mysteries of the physical world and bolsters faith by allowing us to understand reality better.
Yeah, I used to believe that psychological hedge too. Seriously, I studied science while being a believer. I’ve had that viewpoint. I’ve just come to the conclusion that the god part of that viewpoint is incorrect.
And no I don’t think science and philosophy are on equal ground wrt revealing reality, I’ve said that to you before.
How exactly is it a “psychological hedge”? You say you where a “believer”. A believer of what exactly? What was your viewpoint? You say you studied science. What did you study and why did you stop or are you still part of the scientific community in some way, doing research etc.?
I did not say they are on equal ground. I said both are important. You can’t have good science without a sound philosophy and philosophy builds on scientific findings.
How exactly is it a "psychological hedge"?
It’s re-assuring yourself the irrational is compatible with the rational in a form of cognitive dissonance, so that you don’t have to face the fact that one is true, and the other is not. Even if they are, in theory, if you specify the irrational idea as not quite being what you were taught, compatible. Or at least morphing the irrational idea until it’s compatible. I’m not talking about a logical entailment that helps the outcome, just a level of comfort one seeks wrt to the irrational idea. And telling yourself it’s compatible with science is a very handy thing to do in your mind to stop you from questioning it too much.
I was raised a Christian, so I believed that there was a God, and Jesus, and the like. The process of conversion to atheism went through various stages of maybe not believing in Jesus, but still in God in a near-biblical form. Then to God simply as a “creator”, then to agnosticism (There may be a creator, but I have no idea if it’s there), then to atheism. There’s various stages of vagueness along the way (to soothe the cognitive dissonance).
I graduated in computer science. Not a “hard” science I know but I still had to do courses in natural sciences (Like a couple of physics courses, and I elected astrophysics a couple of semesters) and picked up the methodologies and reasoning from there. At the moment I’m a developer, so I guess you could call it applied science. 
Looks like you are describing the “psychological hedge” philosophical naturalists and materialists like to employ. How exactly is this relevant?
Great, what’s next, naturalism and/or materialism?
How exactly is this relevant?
You asked me man, I just explained on your request, your quote is even in my quote. Are you following this conversation? Maybe the concept of answering questions is a new experience for you?
If you didn’t notice, that whole post contained answers to questions YOU asked. (Just to be sure you didn’t miss that)
Great, what's next, naturalism and/or materialism?
If I knew what was next, it wouldn’t be “next”, would it?
Yeah, you described what appears to be the stock-standard “psychological hedge” employed by philosophical naturalists and materialists.
Anyway, since you are in the mood for answering questions, here are a few more. I hope you can continue your streak of answering questions, I am enjoying this new experience ;):
Tomorrow is next, you know it is, it is still next. Sooo… no, if you know what is next it does not necessarily mean it is not next any more. You can also not be a naturalist and/or a materialist today and know that there is a big likelihood that you might embrace it next. I am guessing it is a no though…
I approve of the metaphor, BoogieMonster. Very apt. 