Is religion merely failed science?

I think it's more of a survival mechanism which propagates itself by protecting its adherents from a bunch of challenges posed by the environment in which the religion was developed, thus allowing them to have kids they can pass it on to. Lots of the rules read more like some kind of game theory strategy if you remove the Godly elements. I'm actually kind of into religion from that point of view. Also a lot of them are like the Simpsons too in that it's layered and obviously a lot more complex than the caricature which smug atheists like to beat up. It has deeper aspects like Biblical exegesis to appeal to the intellectual members of the religion, but the basic message is accessible to anyone.

Science people have evidence of what they talk about. Everything is tangible and prove-able.

religion for centuries: “ we haven’t got so much of a shred of evidence for what we believe in, say, advocate and demand others believe in... and when others fail to believe in it we will market them as bad people “

Religion is a coping mechanism and business.

Religion doesn't employ the scientific method so no, it's not science.

Most people don’t fear god... a rapist won’t fear god.. but he’ll be in fear of getting caught and made pay for his crimes by law enforcement or say a relative of his victim...in THIS life.

zero proof of heaven / hell or any afterlife. Nobody ever returned from the dead... if it’s there, we’ll find out.

Just to clarify it's not the fear of getting caught in any life stops most people being rapists, it's just wrong and a horrific idea to most people myself included.

Religion tells you the whys. It's completely cocksure, but in reality it doesn't have a clue.

But it'll saw your head off for not believing.

Well if it wasn't religion they'd find another excuse. Many things are done in the name of religion as an excuse to attack or persecute those don't agree.

jesus walked on water. Walking on water is one of the common delusions schizophrenics have. A lot of these miracles in the bible could be psychosis.

organised religion are just a grift and a way to suppress promiscuous women and marry them off to guys with really tiny tinklers.

Religion originated from the attempts of the ignorant to understand the World.

Imagine what it was like to be a person alive 2,000 years ago, 6,000 years, 10,000 years. No history, no context, no enlightenment, no literature or literacy, no science.

You woke up in the morning and your only thoughts were food, shelter, warmth and sustenance for any children and avoiding those things known to cause injury or illness, though you didn't understand the latter in any way. A fever would usually take you by age 35 or 40 and that would be that.

All that you saw; the sun, the night, the snow, the wind, growth, wildfire, infection, death - they were just facts of life, unexplained and inexplicable.

Religion grew out of the need of a basically intelligent humanity, in its infancy and ignorance, to attribute meaning to those powerful phenomena that knew no other meaning. All those prehistoric religions in different parts of the World largely followed that same structure, independently of each other. That says a lot about it.

Later, over centuries, millenia, those solutions became more complex, more intertwined, mixed with the chinese whispers of story telling - and it was only oral tradition early on - and the theories of gods and God and godheads developed. Those with some knowledge tried to influence those without and of course there was strong elements of manipulation and growth of conflict from all of it.

Religion may well be a failed science in that it was the search for answers, but so much of religion includes science that its hard to deny. Look at the teachings of Mohammed, the Kosher traditions - they are all fundamentally about health and sanitation, avoiding contamination in ingredients and cooking and sexual transmission of disease. It all boils down to rituals to stay alive and get your kids into early adulthood, to keep the show on the road. Nothing more.

I agree with Jim here. Science is an examination of the material world only, not purporting to even attempt to answer questions about whether the non-material/spiritual exists.

Of course contemporary science does assume that all things happen exclusively by material causation - and this is an in-built assumption - but this is a relatively new belief and I do not think this belief was dominant or widespread prior to the publication of Edwin Schrodinger's "What is Life?" in 1944.

In "What is Life?" Schrodinger re-forumlated the fundamental understanding of biology so that it became inseparable from materialism. I think he was mistaken but people rarely stop to question and examine root assumptions once they're been absorbed into culture. Yet assumptions are not 'based on evidence' - they precede and help to determine what qualifies as evidence.

Funnily enough I think Schrodinger would have been living in Clontarf when he wrote this book.

Eamonn DeValera set up an international Scientific Institute in Dublin and tried to attract famous scientists to Ireland. Ludwig Von Wittgenstein lived in Galway for a time.

Another visiting scientist posited that St. Patrick was actually a composite of two historical personages which led Flann O'Brien to write in the Irish Times (quoting from memory), "So far Eamonn DeValera's new Scientific Institute is endeavouring to prove that there were two Saint Patricks and no God."

Well no because an atheist is someone who is entirely without theism - they are a-theist, just as a person without any morals is amoral.

If you believe in any god/s at all then you aren't an atheist to any extent, you are a theist.

Consideration of the connotations of physical phenomena pre-exist any notion of philosophy as you describe it.

Yes, most religions do concern themselves with the philosophical, of course, but you have to look at a time prehistoric to both. From where did the threads of such religion come. Ancient humanity were concerned with the world around them, long before they were concerned about the nature of themselves. The battle for basic survival in prehistory didn't allow them the luxury of early philosophy, but what they did perceive did lay the building blocks of all spirituality, existentialism, theology and so on.

But "We don't know, therefore god did it" is not actually an answer. Postulating the existence of a god actually raises far more questions than it supposedly answers.

We know the world was not created in seven days, that humanity did not spring forth without precursor creatures, that we are not all descended from two humans, that woman was not created from the rib of a man, that there was no global flood, etc. etc. but when religious dogma is disproven it conveniently becomes "metaphor".

I'd like to know the recognised benefits of not wearing clothes made from mixed fibres, or not trimming certain parts of one's beard?

The main reason religions exist is to asuage the fear of death. Some clever con artists played to this greed for life by concocting a scam wherby they would gain power and a comfortable life, while the gulible would get continuity of life after death.

What basis have you to claim that we are?

I'd love to know how it is you think that radio waves can travel over 100 million light years in the space of less than 150 years.

"We should have heard of them" - why? We've only been listening for a blink of an eye. If some civilisation 10,000 light years away sent us a message 10,150 years ago we wouldn't have heard it. If they're a bit further away and it reaches here in 500 or 1000 years, will there be anyone still here to hear it? One of the main variables in determining whether such communication could be possible is how long can a supposedly intelligent civilisation last without either destroying itself or being destroyed by something else...

tl,dr: our own galaxy, never mind the universe which contains billions of galaxies, is vast beyond our comprehension and we are extremely conceited to think it revolves around us, as religions do. The universe has been around for billions of years, humanity only for a tiny period in comparison.

@Hotblack Desiato

"What basis have you to claim that we are?"

the scientific principle obviously, until we find absolute evidence that there is life out there we must assume that there is not.

"I'd love to know how it is you think that radio waves can travel over 100 million light years in the space of less than 150 years."

a light year is the distance that light travels in one year, radio waves like light waves are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light. Actually you are partly correct they have travelled nearly 150 light years at this stage

""We should have heard of them" - why? We've only been listening for a blink of an eye. If some civilisation 10,000 light years away sent us a message 10,150 years ago we wouldn't have heard it. If they're a bit further away and it reaches here in 500 or 1000 years, will there be anyone still here to hear it? One of the main variables in determining whether such communication could be possible is how long can a supposedly intelligent civilisation last without either destroying itself or being destroyed by something else...

This is the "Fermi paradox" though by the laws of statistics and probability there should be many more intelligent civilisations out there and even if they did wipe themselves out eventually surely they would still be thousands of years of technology and radio transmissions that would be wafting through space and this should have re occured many times in the universe. Yet nothing silence "Where is Everybody" as Fermi asked. Therefore there should be constant radio traffic from all those civilisations whether existing or not the same as we still receive light from stars that have long ago burnt out