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I think it is very funny that someone whose /. nickname is mitogen-activated protein kinase (yes, I'm an evil molbio atheist who recognizes signal transduction when he sees it) would organize his life around the supposed will of a hypothesized entity whose action is unmeasurable, whose existence is non-physical (prove otherwise!), whose explanatory power is so broad as to have been overapplied so frequently that it is reasonable to assume that any application is incorrect without strong supporting evidence, and whose nature is unamenable to direct study.

Why MAPK anyway? Human oncology? Or are you interested in the high conservation of the pathway in eukaryotes (orthology, for example)? If the latter, I am either astonished or impressed depending on whether or not you're trolling on the theism front.

If you're in medicine and touch on molecular oncology you might want to treat yourself in a spare moment to some of the work following on Lundquist's HSP/SAPK/JNK investigations, like the work in Drosophilia Rho (which would be of immediate professional interest to you), the more general exploration of the discovered evolutionary homologs, or the kind-of-sort-of-maybe challenge to the central dogma (chaperonin-tubulin alternative splicing vs transcription). In particular, the statistical mechanics (quantitative biology) approaches to allelic drift in asexually reproducing populations (including somatic cells in plants and animals) leads to interesting comparisons with allelic drift in germlines and derived populations. It is very hard to see any tilting of probabilities that would support an interventionist dice-roller...

Stepping back a bit, if you're interested in oncology at a molecular level, you must be well versed in the standards of evidence based medicine and the thin line between ethics and rigor that admits recurring 1-patient experiments. Aren't you tempted to apply those standards to faith using yourself as a cohort? Does God refuse to deviate from chance in this sort of experiment? Does a deviation from chance appear as the cohort is broadened and the experiment is controlled? If a suspected carcinogen or oncogene activation system behaved this way under clinical study, what would your reaction be?

And what do you base your trust on? Where's the foundation? You state that faith is belief without evidence, and trust is build up over time (with supporting evidence, I assume).

You need to believe in the evidence, don't you? You need to believe in the method that garners the evidence, (and in the tests you perform on that method to make sure the method is valid, and the checks that you place on those test, etc.)? Further, it seems to me that you need to have faith that your perception and interpretation of the evidence (after all, it's minute electrical impulses that are being processed by a massively parallel organic computer) isn't causing you to misplace your trust. How can you be sure that your self-diagnostic isn't broken? I think I'm a sane consciousness in a physical body, but what reassurances do I have that my physical body isn't tied down in a mental institution (or that I'm a brain in a jar or a construct in a computer simulation, etc.)?

To me, it's a matter of where you put your faith. Do you:
1) Believe in the ability of man to interpret, understand and explain his environment
2) Believe that "it is what it is and has always been*"
3) Spread your belief between the camps**?

I don't see how you can deny faith and claim difference from those who simplemindedly follow theism, but I'm willing to entertain the possibility.

* The universe sprung fully formed 4,000 years ago created for our benefit or to test us, or whatever. Given the possibility that it was formed with features pre-aged (fossils laid in bedrock, light from distant stars "placed" enroute, etc.), how do you prove this is not the case?

** There was a guiding hand that formed the rules that allowed our existence. Or within the rules of physics, a being (or race) of sufficient power and knowledge crafted the beginnings of life as we know it. Or something else along those lines.

Wow, thanks for that response. There is too much here to respond to, but I want to address the issue of theistic evolutionists.

General theism (or deism) and evolutionism could be compatible, yes. I'll grant that. But if the theist purports to be of a religion based on the Bible, and he also accepts microbes-to-man evolution, he is living a contradiction. The creation account given in the Book of Genesis is fundamentally incompatible with many doctrines of modern evolutionism. Everybody gets caught up on the length of a "day" (Hebrew: yom) in Genesis 1 -- Is it 24 hours or millions of years? While I think the answer from the text is pretty obvious and believe that that issue alone is sufficient to make the two views unmixable, the divide goes far beyond that.

disclaimer: I'm an atheist. (Possibly leaning towards unconventional theism, but I digress...)

My favorite writing on the matter has to be the stuff that came from Kant himself. He very eloquently addresses this problem: Does morality have an abstract basis because of some deity or because of rational logic? His solution was to try to examine where logic 'came from'. I'm of the opinion that logic doesn't come from any divine inspiration, and that it's just an intellectual ability we have. But, that only answers the HOW and not the WHY; what is it precisely that makes 2+2=4? It would seem that logic is a consequence of the underlying structure and rules governing reality (as we know it). So, if one then treats those underlying rules as if it was a deity in itself then one can see how rational morality can be said to be grounded in the 'rules of the universe' aka 'God's will', while at the same time being a product of mankind's intellect and intuition.

Kant was of the opinion that the rules of logic represent the will of the creator of the universe, as they seem to be the only things that exist simply because they have to.

Oh, please. You can't have "intelligent design" without an "intelligent designer" any more than you can have "creation" without a "creator". You're not pulling the wool over anyone's eyes when you say I'm lying when I say, "blue is blue". ID is about theism, and it's promoted by theists, plain and simple.

More to you missing the point, biochemistry isn't exactly evolutionary biology, and you'd have to ask Behe what his agenda was and why he decided to pretend to be an expert in a field other than the one he studied. It's chemistry. Biochemists do NOT study living organisms or populations, they primarily analyze and synthesize molecules that are part of organisms or have effects on organisms, e.g., pharmaceuticals. A biochemist is to the life sciences what a jockey is to basketball. It's funny how almost everyone in the parade of ID "experts" is in a non-biological field. You wouldn't consult with a history professor on a legal matter, just saying someone is a "scientist" doesn't mean he possesses expertise in a tangentially-related discipline. This is evidenced in the way he and other pseudo-origins-experts speak on the subject of life sciences. There are plenty of ID proponents in physics and chemistry, but not in the life science disciplines, simply because, while the scientific method is largely the same through all branches, the subject matter and approach to research are substantially different.

I personally consider there to be many unknowns than are necessarily comfortable in the theory of macroevolution. They're interesting, I can't explain some of the chicken-before-egg paradoxes with cellular machinery. But there are down-to-Earth explanations for phenomena like punctuated equilibrium. Most simply, that there are multiple phenotypes coexisting within a population (consider human population, where we have different blood types, eye colors, skin colors, heights, and a host of trivial differences and non-lethal genetic defects), until some external pressure causes one or more phenotypes to suddenly be wiped-out, leaving only a subset, which may be significantly different than the general population was. They may have survived based on one trait that improved survivability dramatically, but any other morphological changes in that population would be part and parcel of the punctuation. Implying that the Hand of God (tm) had to be involved with such things is both unsupported by any evidence, but it's utterly unnecessary.

Being curious is what science is all about. Noticing interesting things or possible flaws in an existing theory and digging deep to answer them is how science gets done. I, for one, welcome interesting questions and objections to theories, regardless of who they're from. But it's antithetical to any of the sciences to fall back to supernatural explanations for those interesting things. Gravity isn't a magical force field. Chemistry isn't alchemy. Astronomy isn't astrology. And life science isn't about creators or intelligent designers. At least not until compelling evidence is produced as to the precise nature and existence of that being so it's not an unfalsifiable unknown entity.

The main tenet of ID is that there is a creator who created life. These people are not concerned about science in the least, the complexity and lack of explanation isn't what bothers them.

Okay, lie.

It is trivial to demonstrate that "these people" are "concerned about science", unless you propose that, say, Behe pursued an advanced degree in Biochemistry and then a professorship for the sole purpose of advocating theism, upon which ID does not rest anyway. For myself, I also understand that theism does not rest on ID, but if in fact there are particular instances of "intervention" into the processes of evolution demonstrable (evolution itself, lending itself to being considered as of theistic origin, regardless), I consider that to be of considerable interest, much as awareness of the phenomenon of Punctuated Equilibrium is, as a basic matter of science, history, and knowledge.

The theory that aliens designed life as we know it on Earth is utterly unfalsifiable. Dawkins likely wasn't so much admitting anything, as throwing around other fantastic theories. It's just another flavor of the Flying Spaghetti Monster hypothesis. It has precisely the same degree of falsifiability as the notions presented in the Holy Bible regarding the existence of God and his creation of everything, and it's intentionally absurd to satire theism. It doesn't matter that everyone knows that FSM is a satirical fabrication, that's the entire point: even though it's a known falsehood, nobody can disprove the existence of the FSM. It cuts to the quick of why Christianity, despite some additional provenance in that people have truly believed in it and its principal actors for a few thousand years, is in exactly the same boat.

Dawkins is being intellectually honest in "admitting" that something unfalsifiable could've happened. In Dawkins' world, aliens (remarkably advanced beings, but nothing supernatural) are a more probable explanation than the ludicrously unfalsifiable belief in the supernatural. Dawkins is only being less-than-objective in his complete discounting of the possibility of God. That's still unfalsifiable, but Dawkins is so opposed to the God Delusion that he just discards the notion outright. I don't like that about him, even though I share much the same view-- I'll respect the remote possibility of an unfalsifiable theory...but I consider that to be such a black mark against it that I really won't dignify it with a point-by-point refutation or any status in a debate.

Ben Stein, on the other hand, is being intellectually dishonest as he pushes his completely unfalsifiable theory and creatively edits footage to make it look like his opponents' theories are just as unfalsifiable. It's not clever, it's disingenuous if Stein is purporting to try to foster an intellectual debate. It's a strawman. Nothing more, nothing less.

Just because the "establishment" does not want to discuss totally futile nonsense like the squaring of a circle or perpetuum mobiles, this does not mean they have closed minds. Its is just extremely boring and a useless waste of time to go through the same nonsense over and over again.

Creationims is nonsense. It adds nothing to scientific insight. Theism is useless. It adds nothing to scientific insight.

Yes, scientists can be very closed minded and stubborn and even stupid. And "the scientific community" can falsely disregard insights and new ideas for a while. That has happened and still happens all the time.

But creationism is so fundamentally wrong and nonsensical in so many ways that the contrary can be said: somebody actively supporting anything that so fundamentally goes against all scientific rational thinking disqualifies him- or herself as a scientist.

A physicist building a perpetuum mobile should get fired. A biologist teaching creationism or ID should get fired on similar grounds.

Given the capacity that humanity collectively and individually possess for cruelty I'm not sure I want to jump too quickly to esteem myself or anyone else too highly. I've never committed any action that could be labelled particularly heinous but I have spoken hatefully towards others without cause. I have cheated in order to secure my own desires and in various other ways acted in ways that would not be considered good. And I have no doubts that you and others would relate the same given sufficient introspection. And granting that I question the merits of any notion of self-esteem, what is there in man that he should esteem himself?

Also, I don't pretend to know my "supernatural purpose" as you so derisively try to put it. But to know that my life has meaning beyond any existential meaning I might merely like to create for it is not worthy of pity. When I reflect on my life, informed by the revelation of the God of the Bible, I don't have to invent meaning for myself, the meaning for all things exists whether I acknowledge it or not. God gives meaning to all things and apart from Him there is not meaning, that is the sad estate of philosophical naturalism.

Regarding other living things and their purpose: they exist to the Glory of God. They reveal the wondrous creative capacity of God who creates the multiplicity of living and non-living things. They possess purpose and their existence has meaning and worth just as humans do, merely in a different sense. Read the Psalms and you will gather the place that all of creation has in relation to the purposes and meaning that comes from God.

Other things having consciousness is not terribly interesting or germane. Consciousness does not have to be unique for humanity to be unique among living things, at least not in a theistic system. Naturalism is subjectively unsatisfying at this very point in that it has no room for regarding humanity as distinct from other living things even though we seem to possess an innate desire or understanding of ourselves as distinct, special or set apart from other living things. Only theism satisfies this subjective need. Our "consciousness" doesn't make us human, what it means to be human is deeper than that. Naturalism is shallow in that it seeks to reduce things in simplistic ways, in ways that are unpalatable to many if polling and research of such matters can be trusted.

the 95% include athiests and agnostic. agnostic is an intermediery position, someone unwilling to side 100% with the scientific method. An athiest is someone who does not believe in theism, not because they think they know that a god is impossible, but because there is no evidence for it, the same as you wouldnt believe anything crazy which is not supported by real evidence.

the idea that the universe is created by an intelligent being is a valid idea. however this is not a default position. the default position is "i dont know" so as these scientists dont have evidence towards a creator im certain they have the default position of i dont know.

this is seperate however from the god of the abrahamic religions, who is infallible. not only is there no scientific evidence for this but there is a great deal of evidence that is at odds with this theory.

an unimaginably intelligent and powerful being is very different to an omnipotent omnipresent infallible one. one is plausible as any other theory you can think up at this point - to my knowledge. the other (theism) is so at odds with evidence and observation that being an a-theist is the only scientific position currently. just like being an a-teapotist or a-spaghetti monsterist is.

You know, kind of like Einstein, who was "religious" in the sense that he believed in a fundamental and purposeful (deterministic) order, rather than the stark random chance esposed by the "non-religious"

Well exactly, they are only "religious" in this sense, not in the sense of the religions followed by billions of people on the planet.

This is not "essentially religious belief", this is using the same word to describe a very different concept, that is nothing to do with the supernatural or theism.

While the smoke is still coming from the error burn I might just add that the point of my reply was that atheisim did not make Dawkins famous, if anything it was the other way around.

I don't know the answer to the question about the assumed evolutionary advantages bestowed on theists. Is it more advantageous to follow the preist or the prophet, or is more advantageous to do a bit of both and let god/evolution sort it out?

Ultimately it is too difficult for us to predict which traits will be most useful. I think if you're an atheist you really can't comment meaningfully about which traits are better for our race. There's simply too many variables, possibilities, and environments to consider. As you essentially said, let god/evolution sort it out! As a theist I don't think survival is the greatest good anyway. It's just interesting to see atheists act as though it is important that we identify which traits are most advantageous. Why should they care if theism succeeds? Obviously it's the most successful in this given environment if it succeeds. Let the chips fall where they may.

Philosophy != Religion. In philosophy, no matter what your belief, you have to explain how you got there, and "I read it in a book one time" doesn't usually cover it. Saying something twice makes it no more true. As for talking down to them.. have you seen Dawkins discussing theism with a theist? the man should be given a medal for patience. He is not antagonistic, in that he does not (and he has stated this) intend to cause offence in what he writes.

You are confused about the difference between religion and theism. Judaism and Hinduism are both theistic religions. The former is monotheist and the latter is polytheist. To fully burn your error into your mind, consider this definition:
Belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in a personal God as creator and ruler of the world.

See how belief in many gods also counts as theism? You should save the clever arrogance, like telling me I have no clue, for times when you're actually right. As it stands, you've just set yourself up for a bigger fall.

Wouldn't matter if the person you responded to had named a specific religion anyway. His claims could easily be taken as implicitly referring to the culture in which they live. You've just interpreted him(/her) as making a universal claim when there's no reason to suppose that's the case. Perhaps they'd freely admit to you that in India, yes, it would be better to promote Hinduism than Christianity. After all, adaptation is influenced by the environment we're in, not some hypothetical environment we might one day encounter.

"Polytheism is a form of theism. So your point is what, exactly?"

Nice try, but both are forms of religion, not forms of each other. My point is you don't have a clue.

Which society? - India for instance has at least twice as many polytheists as the entire population of the US.

I'm not sure he does it "rather well" so much as "very loudly". Most of his arguments lack basic rigor, and he comes off as nothing more than a political campaigner appealing to quasi intellectuals and high-school graduates. He doesn't seem to understand that non-belief is a belief system in itself, and that he's relegated himself to being Yin to theisms Yang with very little overall value.

Meanwhile... real scientists, with their minds on science rather than saving or not-saving our souls, are getting in and doing actual real work trying to figure this whole thing out. ;) The whole Dawkins fad is great popcorn viewing though.

Theists do better in society, so that's what he should remind people of, "survival of the fittest". Dawkins should promote theism, as those who embrace God are the fittest to survive in our society, due to social stigmatism on atheists..

Dude, that's like saying we should all become nazis because there's anti-semitism in the world.

Why? What's wrong with continuing to suspend judgment in the lack of evidence? I don't know whether my next-door neighbor wears underpants to bed, but I don't take a "leap of faith" just because I'm compelled to hold uninformed opinions about issues I don't know about.

Dawkins is one of these arrogant "know it all" individuals, who think they know better than the rest. A true scientist is supposed to keep his/her options open. You do not like the naive idea of a personal God that gives and takes? There are other views of God, just look at the Eastern philosophies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taoism There are some fundamental problems in Natural Sciences for which there is no simple solution. Darwin's Theory of Evolution explains how species evolve from other species and its basic premises have been confirmed time and time again. But what is the origin of Life itself? Currently there is no viable answer. There is not a single shred of evidence that something that is alive can appear from something that is not alive. The definition of what is "life" is itself a touchy subject, but let us say that we can draw the line somewhere (an amoeba let's say). It could be that life had always existed in the Cosmos in one form or another (you know, the Force, the Tao, Vril etc.). People cannot comprehend infinity and limitless, because we are ourselves weak finite bounded creatures. Here are some things to think about (Phyllotaxis): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllotaxis People also usually do not distingush the subject of religion, as a social practice, from theism as a philosophy. There is a huge difference. For example Islam-Christianity-Judaism are religions, Taoism is more of a philosophy. It is the blind worshipping of ancient tribal rituals and unquestionable submission to authority, that forces more open minded individuals towards atheism. But atheism has its own problems. Samuel Beckett once said that an atheist is not someone who does not believe in God, but someone who wants to believe but he can't. Sometimes it gets pretty lonely out there. "The Kingdom of God is spread out on Earth, but people do not see it."