What religion do you follow?

[FoxyBunny]

Not to turn this down a different path entirely, but I would like to point out that science itself is proving religion. Beyond the whole "hard wired to believe" study, there have been many studies that show faith is beneficial. People who attend church every week live longer and have fewer health problems. It is speculated that it could be because of the social interaction involved, but why don't we see the same benefits from people with a weekly pinochle club? Why don't poker players live longer? Meditation is now an accepted form of therapy. Double-blind studies prove that people who are prayed for have faster recovery times after surgery with fewer complications.

Science can't answer all of this, and people may read into it what they like. But I say that discounting faith entirely is every bit as blind as simply believing blindly in whatever your religion has told you to believe. And I still say that the greatest leap of faith of all is to believe that some primordial ooze somehow spawned complex and spectacularly designed organisms as exist on the planet today...all by sheer accident and random mutations.

[Professor X]

Not to turn this down a different path entirely, but I would like to point out that science itself is proving religion.

Actually you have a point there. Even great minds like Stephen Hawkings and Einstein say, "there must be something greater that what we can think or imagine of". Leonardo da Vinci himself said something along the lines of, "science and the church are the same thing, just speaking a different language".

[Ikeni]

Not to turn this down a different path entirely, but I would like to point out that science itself is proving religion. Beyond the whole "hard wired to believe" study, there have been many studies that show faith is beneficial. People who attend church every week live longer and have fewer health problems. It is speculated that it could be because of the social interaction involved, but why don't we see the same benefits from people with a weekly pinochle club? Why don't poker players live longer? Meditation is now an accepted form of therapy. Double-blind studies prove that people who are prayed for have faster recovery times after surgery with fewer complications.

Science can't answer all of this, and people may read into it what they like. But I say that discounting faith entirely is every bit as blind as simply believing blindly in whatever your religion has told you to believe. And I still say that the greatest leap of faith of all is to believe that some primordial ooze somehow spawned complex and spectacularly designed organisms as exist on the planet today...all by sheer accident and random mutations.

Well that's just absurd. A test was done for one group of hospital patients who prayed (or were prayed for), and another group without any prayer, and it was the latter who recovered more quickly than the former. There are too many things to consider when it comes to living longer and health problems, and faith is definitely not a defining factor. Perhaps the reason these people who attend Church had these results because of the effect it may have on them, whereas if you forced a bunch of atheists in to Church every week for a few months, then I doubt it would have the same effect.

The problem here I feel, is that rather than considering the effect prayer/religion may have on the body and mind itself, you instead use religion itself to support your theory, upon which there is still no proof. if somebody writes with a pen, that writing exists there because of the person who used it, that's a definite fact. On the other hand, attributing prayer and church attendance to health is another thing entirely, where you would have to consider all things relevant to the test group in mind. If you can duplicate the effect prayer or church attendance had on those individuals through an entirely non-spiritual method (which you probably can), then it leaves us back to square one again.

The problem I feel is that we give religion too much credit. If something unusual happens, we might attribute it to "God", rather than considering the exact factual reasons why the event may have happened. We interpret that this event would have been influenced by God rather than interpreting a more scientific explanation because it doesn't fit in with our mindset.

[Bree Fletcher]

Science can't answer all of this, and people may read into it what they like. But I say that discounting faith entirely is every bit as blind as simply believing blindly in whatever your religion has told you to believe. And I still say that the greatest leap of faith of all is to believe that some primordial ooze somehow spawned complex and spectacularly designed organisms as exist on the planet today...all by sheer accident and random mutations.

Here's the thing: people say that, because life is so unlikely (which I'll grant it is,) it can't have come about by just chance. But think about this: Even a (to choose a number at random) 0.0001% chance of life appearing at any given place means that over 1,000,000 planets, (and there certainly are more than that,) there's actually a good chance of it occurring. Get to a billion. Or a trillion. Go to however many there actually are in this universe. The probability of life arising at least once approaches certainty. So it just happens that it's here, in this particular place. You can't use that as proof for anything divinely inspired.

[FoxyBunny]

I don't try to offer proof of divine intervention. Nor do I attribute the results of those studies to religion, per se. What I am pointing out is that faith itself seems to be beneficial. The studies on prayer helping people to heal faster are very similar to those that show petting a cat lowers blood pressure. I am certain that shoving atheists into church for an hour each Sunday would be no more beneficial than forcing someone who has a hysterical phobia of cats to sit and pet one. There is something about faith and the acts associated (the rituals of a church service are actually psychologically identical to the rituals of bio-feedback and meditation) that is intrinsic to humans and which offers benefits. My question is: Why?

Why is it that in a species where industry and alertness provide the greatest survival benefits, people can benefit significantly from relaxing and going through the rituals of religion/meditation? How does that come about? We do not see similar needs in the insect world, but we do in many other mammals.

For those who believe in a higher power, simple things like this can serve as proof of their beliefs. For those who do not believe in a higher power, it opens a whole new topic of debate which I find fascinating.

And I still stand by my assertion that although life itself was statistically bound to exist, the sheer complexity and genius of the various physiological processes found in animals (man included) is mind-boggling. The more you learn about anatomy and medicine, the more you come to believe that there isn't ANY chance this was sheer accidental mutations starting with a single-cell organism.