Re: Evidence for "Big Bang Theory"

Kai Henningsen (kai@khms.westfalen.de)
18 May 1995 22:29:00 +0100

Yasha@bigraf.tamu.edu wrote on 16.05.95 in <Yasha-1605951136560001@mac2wild2.tamu.edu>:

> In article <5lz512dzcsB@khms.westfalen.de>, kai@khms.westfalen.de (Kai
> Henningsen) wrote:
>
> > This may be because science, to be successful, needs to be tolerant -
> > different views are _needed_ here. While religion does not have that
> > requirement per se, it has to live in a world where science is
> > demonstrably vastly more successful (for example, through centuries
> > (millenia?) of trying, religion has not managed to improve harvest -
> > science does so quite easily) - so it needs to adopt some of science's
> > ideas, in a limited fashion, to avoid losing out completely. A limited
> > tolerance is one of these. History shows that that's an unusual ingredient
> > of religion, nearly never present where religion has the upper hand.
>
> You may be skating on thin ice here, Kai. I remember hearing about

I don't think so, because ...

> certain asian cultures whose festival schedule was linked to agricultural
> concerns such as rotation of irrigation, planting, and harvesting.
> Westerners came in with high yield hybrids and convinced the people to
> give up their carefully honed rotation scheme and irrigate to their hearts
> content. The result was disasterous, rodents, soil erosion, low yields,
> etc. I don't remember if they went back to their traditional ways or not.

... this doesn't show anything at all about science, you know.

Science, like religion, gets used by people; in both cases, some use it
the way it was intended, others don't.

And, by the way, just because one method was "traditional" and one was
"western", does not necessarily mean that the first was religious and the
second was scientific. Neither does the linkage with the festival schedule
mean any such thing. You'd have to know a lot more about how it all came
to be to judge this - in fact, I'd guess that these westerners depended on
tradition as well.

I'd like a single example where religion (not to be confused with
primitive science, as in observing cause-and-effect, whether done or
approved by priests or not) improved a harvest. There are lots of examples
for science.

> While science and religion may serve some of the same functions in
> society, they do not fill identical roles, merely overlapping ones.

Well, of course. That's because one of them works :-)

Kai

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