When I read number 4, “nor upon what is in a scripture,” it sounded to me like the idea was that a person should not follow scripture as final authority and should instead follow evidence or science.
I'm not sure it's necessarily saying that.
I would suggest the Buddha might well be saying don't just
read scripture and rely on that, one should
do what scripture advises and thereby make it your own.
Nor should a person follow 'science' as a final authority, because it's not, it's just a field of knowledge.
And by science we should discern between the physical and the humanities, for example. Philosophy was the science that gave birth to physics, chemistry and mathematics.
Likewise, not all evidence is empirically derived.
I think part of the confusion in this thread is that the conversation keeps bouncing between religion, philosophy, and science.
Indeed, and the first and third in that list too often and too easily are placed in opposition, which is an error.
Philosophy can bridge between the two.
Religious language can be meaningful in a religious, cultural, poetic, or philosophical way, but it is not the same thing as scientific explanation.
Quite. Some describe one as the reason why, and the other providing reasons how.
The reason I brought up Andy’s video is because Andy explains why humans may have started to believe and why humans may have developed religious systems.
To be fair, he's offered an opinion. It's not a fact, and it's not inarguable. It's agreeable to atheists, for sure.
From my atheist view, religion cannot replace science when explaining how the physical universe works.
Never tries to, really, in the modern world. In the ancient world, science had some pretty weird notions, too.
Atheists have been explaining that to Christians for years.
What you're talking about is ill-informed parties on both sides.
Science cannot replace religion, although it has done in the minds of many, who treat the term science as some kind of inarguable and infallible dogma.
For example, no, human life did not come from only two people in the way some people read Genesis literally.
OK, and as you're in the US, I do whole-heartedly sympathise for what passes as 'Christianity' in your country and with the sheer tonnage of fundamentalist bull•••• you're exposed to, but please don't judge Christianity as such by those standards. The loud and populist versions in the US come across to me more as abnormal psychological disorders than genuine Christianity.
Having said that, the vast majority of people have little or no understanding of how science actually works – electricity, for example – so that same order of 'simple ignorance' is found in every walk of life and every field of human activity.
Look at how social media is shaping culture. Where is the 'truth' and 'evidence' of its claims?
More recently, Christians and non-Christians have also explained that some religious concepts may have come from older stories, but that still does not make those stories science.
Quite. Science was born out of those stories.
I think it is okay for someone to believe in God or believe in a religion, or spiritual tradition. But belief by itself cannot explain how the universe works scientifically. When religious claims try to explain the physical universe without evidence, they can start using vague mechanisms that do not hold up well when tested. That is where atheists usually push back hard, because those explanations are not the same as evidence based science.
OK. I, like many Christians and many religious, believe in current cosmological theories – the Big Bang was posed by a Catholic priest, genetics owes a huge debt to a Catholic monk – we believe in evolution.
My original reason for coming into this forum was that I was trying to understand whether language like “God has made me a member of the church” could be understood in a non religious or supernatural way, such as through human evolution, human cognition, culture, and the brain mechanisms that led humans to develop belief in gods and religious communities.
Yes, of course it can. Humans are genius at rationalising their experience. You need to study sociology.
But I do not think I can use the Bible itself to explain science.
That good, because that's never what it set out to do, nor what it is for ...
At most, I can study what the Bible meant to people, how it shaped communities, and how humans developed religious beliefs. That is different from using it as a scientific explanation for how the universe or human life works.
Yes, but then that's not studying the Bible for what the Bible is. To understand the Bible requires one to engage with it, to 'do' it ... that's a whole different story.
Not all people are scholars or philosophers. People are quite happy to follow. Look how 'social media' is shaping communities ...
So I am trying to separate religious meaning from scientific explanation.
Why not just take it as a given that the two are utterly different, and when someone says they're the same, just ignore them?
Well, not yet. But who knows about future?