Mike Dulak grew up Catholic in Southern California, but by his teen years, he began skipping Mass and driving straight to the shore to play guitar, watch the waves and enjoy the beauty of the morning. “And it felt more spiritual than any time I set foot in a church,” he recalled.
Nothing has changed that view in the ensuing decades.
“Most religions are there to control people and get money from them,” said Dulak, now 76, of Rocheport, Missouri. He also cited sex abuse scandals in Catholic and Southern Baptist churches. “I can’t buy into that,” he said.
Could you expand your thoughts on this?
I’m always curious when this is said as to what is meant when Atheism and science are called religious.
Sure. To be clear, I’m an engineer and an atheist so I don’t mean it to attack either Athiesm or science by any means.
To start with, we cannot get true knowledge of the world outside ourselves by sensory perception alone. Rather, the way we interpret our sensory inputs is by applying it to some metaphysical framework of how we believe the outside world works.
As a small example, Descartes famously brought up analogy of a melting candle. A totally naive person being born into existence would see melted wax and hardened wax as two different substances. Sensory perception alone would lie to this person. Only by interpreting it through this metaphysical framework do we come to the conclusion that melted wax and hardened wax are the same thing at different temperatures.
This extends to deeper concepts that we can’t directly explain by our experience alone. At some point we stop using our own direct experience and expand our metaphysical framework using something else.
The thing that springs from that “something else” is religion, and in many instances it doesn’t necessarily encompass a concept of divinity or worship. In abrahamic religions it is the Judeo-Christian god. In Daoism it’s the belief in the Dao, an unexplainable force tied to the events of the natural world. In science it’s belief in the scientific method’s ability to produce objective truth with sufficient cooperation and experimentation. They’re all models of the outside world that stem from something beyond a single individuals sensory perception.
Spiritual faith and faith in the scientific method are not the same.
Scientific knowledge is SUPPOSED to be challenged and changed as we gain new information. Religious faith is expected to be accepted without question and regardless of information.
They’re both belief systems pertaining to knowledge of the universe beyond your immediate perception
Of course. However, the central tenet of science doesn’t rely on scientific knowledge but the scientific method itself and it’s assumed power to find objective truth. Any questions about the viability of the scientific method to find objective truth tend to be aggressively rejected.
This isn’t necessarily true. There are some religions that have no authoritative text, central authority, or official dogma; they encourage new perspectives in the nature of the universe. Daoism is one.