Science After Deconverting

[Overcame Faith]

The issue of understanding science is something that is referred to by a number of those who deconvert. Of course, it is not an issue for everyone, but it is common enough that I thought I would begin addressing it. Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not going to teach you science. Rather, I'm going to discuss how for some the Christian religion stifled our understanding of things scientific and then give some suggestions for how to overcome that.

 

I remember my days in church hearing a number of Christians explain why we, the church, must be the ones who counter what the schools are teaching our children about the lies of evolution. To us (yes, including me), it was all laid out in Genesis and that was that. This whole notion of evolution was satan's tool to deceive us.

 

Then there were things like the age of the universe, our sun, and our beautiful earth. Hearing that it was billions of years old was anti-biblical in our minds. It was those godless scientists with their wrong thinking that were attempting to deceive us in the same way they had been deceived by their satanically inspired arrogance.

 

There are other examples, but I think my two examples are enough for you to catch the drift of what I'm getting at.

 

Once having left the religion behind, many on ExC have expressed an interest in learning some of the things that they never learned but many of us feel (or felt) lost in our pursuits. So what to do to catch up?

 

My advice is to read, read, and read some more. There are many extremely well done books and articles written by extremely good scientists who have a talent for conveying their thoughts to the non-scientific public.

 

One of the places I started out was with the issue of evolution. Like I'm prone to do, I decided to begin at the source. I bought myself a copy of Darwin's The Origin of the Species and read it. It's remarkably well written and understandable. After all, it was written to a world who had never heard of the concept of evolution so it is more than understandable to the average person. His arguments, observations, and conclusions are clear and concise. What's more, by reading it, you will see first hand how science is applied and see rational and logical reasoning used at its finest.

 

I think Stephen Hawking is an excellent writer if you are interested in physics and the universe. I bought a copy of A Brief History of Time and read it. I enjoyed it immensly. It's not easy to get through, but the effort is worth it.

 

Are you interested in tackling Einstein's Theory of Relativity and his Special Theory of Relativity? I'm not saying that I fully understand it, but I think I have a much better grasp of it after having done some reading. Michio Kaku, a well know astro physicist, has written a good book on Einstein. It is entitled, "Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed our Understanding of Space and Time." Would you rather read Einstein directly? Stephen Hawking made a great contribution there. Try out his book, "The Essential Scientific Works of Albert Einstein" in which he gathered some of Einstein's great works and includes commentary. I don't follow all (or any, really) of Einstein's equations, but believe it or not, Einstein was capable of writing in a way that is both entertaining and enjoyable.

 

I hope that those of a more scientific bent than I will make some other suggestions. But I think my suggestions can get you started.

 

Enjoy the wonderful world of science.

[blackpudd1n]

I was discussing Dawkins and evolution with my doctor just today. Turns out he's a major fan of Dawkins, and has all of his books, the first that he read being The Selfish Gene.

 

I was telling him that I'm slowing learning about evolution, having realised, at the age of 26 and a new atheist, that I knew NOTHING.

 

My doctor said to me, "you can be a christian and still believe in evolution", and I said, "not in the type of christianity I was involved in". He simply nodded his head and said, "ah yes, fundamentalism".

 

I struggle a bit with Dawkins. I'm currently reading The God Delusion, and some of the science goes a little over my head. However, I find Dawkins to be a very patient teacher, so I'm sure I'll get there. Eventually I'm going to tackle The Selfish Gene- just not quite ready to yet! What I'm finding is that as I continue persisting, it starts to click.

[Voice]

The first book I read after deconversion scared the shit out of me. It was college level plane geometry. It was solid, good sense reasoning laid out by heathens. These heathens were showing me how to think. In order to learn how to think, I had to let heathens teach me.

 

Reading too much of the heavy stuff right away could mask the definition of science. Fresh ex-c's probably don't know that even. It's not taught in churches. Gathering data, forming hypotheses, testing the hypotheses, collecting new data, reforming the hypotheses, etc. It's a process, not an end. It should never be an end. What is evolution? A hypothesis. What is relativity? A hypothesis. They're models only. I think fresh ex-c's who haven't been exposed to science should learn this first.

[Suzy]

The book that triggered my deconversion wasn't a book about evolution or religious studies but one about cosmology. As a Christian I would not have touched a book by an evolutionist (yes, I was a close-minded fundy, even if I have been struggling a LOT with Christianity for more than a decade already). However I was very much tempted by astronomy and cosmology. So one day I was on a forum on astronomy and there's this guy recommending a book titled "The Whole Shebang" by Timothy Ferris. ( http://www.amazon.co...e/dp/0684838613 )

 

The guy on the astronomy forum recommended it saying it changed his whole worldview (without disclosing what his initially worldview was). I didn't expect it to change mine, I thought I was standing firm and safe in my belief in the Christian God , but I was curious, so I bought it. Of course, I knew that cosmology contains "heretical" teachings concerning the age of the Universe, Earth and so on, but I thought I was strong enough in my faith to handle it and reconcile it with what was in the Bible. I started to read it with this frame of mind: if there was something written in it which contradicted the Bible then, of course, I took the Bible as higher authority and assumed that scientists are simply wrong in that matter and it will eventually turn out with more research that the Bible was right. By the time I finished the book however I was a completly changed person. I gained a new level of respect for science. I realized that I couldn't just dismiss scientific claims just like that when they are as well supported by evidence as these claims are. One thing, I remember, impressed me immensly was the story of the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation. How it was first predicted by the Big Bang theory, then a Russian mathematician calculated its properties and then, decades later (and accidentaly) it was discovered with almost exactly the same properties as predicted by the Big Bang theory! That kind of floored me and I started to realize how science actually works and how it deserves a lot more credit than given to it by Christians.

 

All the while I was already struggling a lot with Christianity for a long, long time, only I had a great deal of fear of hell to really start examining Christianity critically. This book helped me to beat my fears and start with that! It made me realize that maybe Christianity is not true after all.

 

Another step was when I bought Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on DVD. And on it there was an episode about Kepler. The thing that captured me in his story was that he struggled with what he descovered because it went against his Christian beliefs. However he decided he will go with the facts, no matter what. And I thought, that's what I will do as well!

 

From then on, my devonversion went pretty quickly and I feel much better since I broke free. In the hindsight I can also say that most of my psychological problems as a Christian stemmed from the Christian faith itself, from the guilt and fear it imposed on me. I can see it now, since I am MUCH happier since my deconversion than I have ever managed to be as a Christian.

[Overcame Faith]

Here are some links that may be interesting and informative about the nature of science:

 

This one is from PBS. It has links to videos, articles, and interviews:

 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/09/index.html

 

Here is a snipet from the introductory paragraph:

 

Science is a way of understanding the world, not a mountain of facts. Before anyone can truly understand scientific information, they must know how science works. Science does not prove anything absolutely -- all scientific ideas are open to revision in the light of new evidence. The process of science, therefore, involves making educated guesses (hypotheses) that are then rigorously and repeatedly tested.

 

Then there's this from the University of Georgia. It is required reading before a college student is allowed to take a geology course. But it's not about geology, but about the basics of science. I think it is a good overview of what science is and what it isn't:

 

http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/railsback_1122science1.html

[LivingLife]

I never had this problem as my upbringing as far as school went was very secular and science based. My brother is 10 years older than me and his scientific acumen sucks. Just the gap of 10 years from the 60's to the 70's when we attended HS was a ginormous difference, all part of the Brit education GED system. I had no siblings that could assist me with homework or answer questions and my parents had no frigging clue. They had already had run ins with the schools concerning my brother that was disadvantaged as the were speaking Afrikaans in a Brit colony before he attended school, my folks had to talk English to us.

 

My problem came with English and the exposure to ye olde KJV English affected my initial years in languages as I had no compunction of using thou, thy, ye etc. Not sure how they dealt with that, can't remember but it required intervention too. I think my dad started using proper English in prayer and at services.

 

I dropped biology in 1973 for Physics with Chemistry (we had to choose) and I have been amazed that the average US xian does not even have what is 40 year old grounding in biology I had, some still have a concept that men have fewer ribs, the mustard seed is the smallest seed etc. *head desk*

 

The fields I followed were in the sciences and my knowledge was expanded on. You cannot simply arrive at a point and say I know it all. You NEVER stop learning and the internet now makes it fun to learn and share and ask questions.

 

I have thread here refuting the flood and proof of an old age earth. IMO that is a key factor to at least getting beyond the YEC age of the earth. It sets the platform to allow for evolution to be plausible as evolution does not happen overnight wrt to hominids (that's us BTW). Evolution is a fact and has oodles of evidence to prove it. The more recent DNA/mRNA mapping cast away most doubts but even I do not fully comprehend it, the field is just so frigging huge.

 

I had no deficiency facing me and the concept of creationism never entered the classroom. The lil' bit of evolution we were taught was about two days worth and then we got on with dissecting frogs, learning how reproduction works. We were never tested on evolution. Much of it was inferred as we leaned about various biological aspects of the plant and animal kingdoms.

 

There is more evidence stacked up for evolution theory than there is for gravity theory.

 

Creationism has no legs and two chapters in the bible does not even address the water cycle, atmospheric phenomenon or simple photosynthesis. Science makes no firm claims to origins but abiogenesis is the best hypothesis at present.

 

What started it all? Nobody knows, including theists. We have the BB theory and that is also observable and has increased in leaps and bound since the Hubble telescope was commissioned.

 

Because the YEC folk have no data, they hijack what science has discovered and modify their stance to suggest that DNA is "evidence" of a creator leading to the non-science of theistic evolution, IOW god has been guiding it.

 

W/o the A&E story being real, the concept of OS falls flat and so too the lineage of the alleged jesus. The flood myth is simply just that. The geological records do not show any evidence anywhere in the world of a great global flood or fludd as I like to call it. That is nail no 2 in the YEC coffin as the lineage traces through Noah who did not exist.

 

Diverting to history a tad, the epic of Exodus never happened as there are no archaeological records to show a 40 year wilderness sojourn in the simple fact, there was not enough water for 2M+ folk and their animals and there are no bones to dig up (there should be a shit load full of those)as they are magically absent. That is nail number three as the laws given never happened as reported. Moses too is a myth.

 

Christians know this and the more science kids learn, the less plausible are the chances the next generation will buy into this crap. Only the lazy and ignorant buy into these myths due to indoctrination. Even the hick town I stay in, no one will deny evolution and an old earth. I have an American friend who is a published biologist and teaches extra medial courses to kid in his town and he is funny and brilliant, perhaps I can invite him here. He is in his 60's already.

 

Sorry for the long post but if you have questions I will try answer them. I have a pretty good idea where to find stuff.

 

A good counter to AnswersinGenesis and the creation institute is a site in Aus No Answers in Genesis lotsa good stuff there and pretty easy to understand.