Post by qiangao on Jul 2, 2015 6:27:50 GMT
1. The great philosopher Socrates was sentenced to death for violating key tenets of society at that time. In Socrates’ philosophic work and in his everyday life, he had gone against the beliefs of Greek society at that time by asserting the idea that the gods that the Greek people held to be true were not real and that there were other gods in existence. These claims were extremely infuriating to many prominent people in Greece at that time as well as many common people who had a deep connection with the Greek gods. Because simply believing something to be true is not a crime, those who wanted to do away with Socrates had to charge him with a crime that was related to his actions and could cause him problems. Socrates was ultimately sentenced to death for the crime of corrupting the youth of Greece by perpetuating his “lies” about the gods. After convicting him of the crime, the jury also sentenced him to death as punishment in order to both make an example out of him and to enact revenge for deconstructing their very way of life. He was physically killed by drinking an amount of poisoned wine.
2. Science has done a lot in terms of answering important questions that people have about life and the universe. However, even though science is capable of answering a great many questions, it cannot answer all questions or any particular questions with a complete degree of certainty. Religious people take these holes in science’s ability to mean that science as a whole is flawed instead of taking it for what it actually means, namely that science is not perfect. Whether it is something like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or something more ambiguous, there are many aspects and areas of science that require people to take “I’m not sure” for an answer. When this point of view of science is coupled with the many things that science has disproven with relation to religion, it is fairly common for people to concoct some insurmountable conflict between science and religion. Some religiously inclined people can accept scientific evidence and incorporate it into their understanding of what religion is. For example, the Bible notes that Earth is only a few thousand years old, while science has proven with a vast degree of certainty that Earth is 4.54 billion years old. For some, these obstacles cannot be reconciled.
2. Science has done a lot in terms of answering important questions that people have about life and the universe. However, even though science is capable of answering a great many questions, it cannot answer all questions or any particular questions with a complete degree of certainty. Religious people take these holes in science’s ability to mean that science as a whole is flawed instead of taking it for what it actually means, namely that science is not perfect. Whether it is something like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or something more ambiguous, there are many aspects and areas of science that require people to take “I’m not sure” for an answer. When this point of view of science is coupled with the many things that science has disproven with relation to religion, it is fairly common for people to concoct some insurmountable conflict between science and religion. Some religiously inclined people can accept scientific evidence and incorporate it into their understanding of what religion is. For example, the Bible notes that Earth is only a few thousand years old, while science has proven with a vast degree of certainty that Earth is 4.54 billion years old. For some, these obstacles cannot be reconciled.