Criticism of Religious Concepts
See also: Faith and rationalitySome criticisms have been aimed at theistic religions such as :
- Religions sometimes posit facts that are conflict with certain scientific models or findings (e.g. evolution, origin of the universe, miracles); for example, the claim that prayer has a beneficial effect on others has been disputed.
- Religions often require behaviors that are not sensible (such as the Old Testament prohibition against wearing garments of mixed fabrics, or punishing children of guilty parents).
- Religions often contain multiple conflicting accounts (for example, discrepancies in the Bible among the four Gospels of the New Testament).
Counterarguments against assumed conflict between the sciences and religions have been offered. For example, C. S. Lewis, a Christian, suggested that all religions, by definition, involve faith, or a belief in concepts that cannot be proven or disproven by the sciences. However, some religious beliefs have not been in line with views of the scientific community, for instance Young Earth creationism. Though some who criticize religions subscribe to the conflict thesis, others do not. For example, Stephen Jay Gould agrees with C. S. Lewis and suggested that religion and science were non-overlapping magisteria. Scientist Richard Dawkins has said that religious practitioners often do not believe in the view of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA).
Read more about this topic: Criticism Of Religion
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism, religious and/or concepts:
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“American thinking, when it concerns itself with beautiful letters as when it concerns itself with religious dogma or political theory, is extraordinarily timid and superficial ... [I]t evades the genuinely serious problems of art and life as if they were stringently taboo ... [T]he outward virtues it undoubtedly shows are always the virtues, not of profundity, not of courage, not of originality, but merely those of an emasculated and often very trashy dilettantism.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.”
—Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794)