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Censored Religious Debate Video Released After Public Outrage
First time accepted submitter tkel writes "On October 12, 2011 Theologian John Haught publicly debated prominent evolutionary scientist and atheist Jerry Coyne at the University of Kentucky. Although both agreed to a videotaping of the event, Haught later prohibited its release because he felt he had been treated unfairly. Coyne released blog posts addressing the matter as an offense to free speech. Reviewing their new status in the blogosphere, Haught and his associates at the University of Kentucky have decided to release the video."
..and one giant win for science.
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...but debating these people only give them credibility they do not deserve. The people who believe in creationism will never be swayed away from it, because their reasons for believing in it it are not the same as ours are for believing evolution. It is not out of an attempt to explain nature and the universe, but an egotistical need to be above it. Being descended from primates is offensive to them because they see the sum of humanity as being a jumble of biological components, rather than our arts and sciences. No wonder: religion has usually opposed arts and sciences until they gained enough traction to threaten the religion itself should it resist further.
It's time for religion to be closed out from the scientific debate altogether. "Faith" has no place in a field based on empirical evidence and doubt. Creationism doesn't even deserve a title as a discredited theory, it belongs with mythology like Atlantis and elves, and should rightly be laughed at with impunity.
Great Intellect...
Well, that's what I get for not RTFA'ing. However, had I, the same argument can be adapted to gems such as (quoting from Wikipedia because I am lazy at the moment):
"He also testified that materialism, the philosophy that only matter exists, is "a belief system, no less a belief system than is intelligent design."
A statement like that shows that you can take the creationism out of the creationist, but not the mindset that led to it. If anything, he is smart enough not to adopt the most easily disproved position, in favor of sneakier ones like "you can't prove religion is false so our positions as just as valid." Of course, again this is me going off Wikipedia having not watched the rather long video yet. He might be a fine and reasonable man... yet something tells me that isn't to be expected.
Great Intellect...
"Censored Religious Debate Video Released After Public Outrage"..... to an audience 20x larger than would otherwise be present.
And yet, it is now a part of the canon of science, in spite of that. I'm still wondering when major religions will not just stop questioning, but actually declare a part of their religion, things like evolution and quantum mechanics. It seems the closest they can get is dragged by public outcry into making some sort of declaration not to talk about it anymore. Point being, science might have some bias, and doesn't everything, but it definitely overcomes it faster.
In the end, it is what you say, not who you are, that matters. The problem I have is when people who have avowed beliefs not backed by any form of evidence begin to make claims involving them. Want to be a creationist christian and a chemist? Sure, why not. But don't act as if I am small-minded if I am more suspicious of him than of others when the same person goes into biology and begins making findings that he claims undermine evolution. Further, I am entirely within my right to laugh at every "theologian," preacher, or priest which declares he knows better than science, yet refuses to provide evidence, or says religion is on the same level as science.
"Many religious people and some churches believe that belief in god may require faith but that understanding god's creation is done through science. That includes both the evolution the universe and the evolution of life."
Which is all fine and good, but that doesn't give them the right to attempt to dictate what is science, should it offend them at some point. I am aware of churches that are quite admittedly progressive, but thank you, I'll still take the word of actual scientists on matters of science.
Great Intellect...
Clearly, since they made that mistake of believing in a god in the first place...
Ok, a quick analysis of your arguments and some counterarguments per paragraph.
par. 1: You state that Christianity=love&peace, and that no-one should hate love and peace. But the one does not require the other, as there can be love and peace without Christianity.
par. 2: You state that Christianity and science are not in conflict. There are two counterarguments: Christianity is inherently anti-scientific in its nature, as it is a belief in something without evidence. Thus, Christianity trains unscientific thought patterns. Second argument is that in politics, Christianity is used as an argument to hinder science. So Christianity and science are in conflict.
par. 3: You state that you should believe in god without any evidence. That there is no way of showing god exists, certainly not in a statistically measurable way. So if god does not influence our lives in the slightest, why believe at all?
par. 4: This paragraph is a bit of a jumble. You state here that love and peace are unattainable on earth, thus conflicting with par. 1. Besides that, it is stated that god died on the cross, but instead it was his son as you should be well aware, or you are considering your god as three gods, the real one, Jezus and the holy spirit. Lastly you state that god does not intervene where we would consider it possible or beneficial. This, again, raises the question of his existence, and my counterargument of: if he does not influence our lives, why believe at all.
Cheers.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
No, you are pretty close. His basic idea is "I believe in all the science you can throw at me, but that still doesn't disprove God". And though he somehow thinks that makes him different, to a real scientist it's not much different from "do you believe in Odin or does Zeus sound more believable?"
I am uncertain if this is just a terrific trolling attempt or if you're really serious.
I can tell you for a fact that God loves you :) God wants us all to live together in love and peace.
I've never understood why is it so important for so many Christians that they feel there is 24/7 someone loving them. Is it insecurity? Would you be depressed if there wasn't? I am genuinely curious about this.
There are a lot of people who spaz out at the mention of Christianity being good for society, but what is wrong with love and peace?
Christianity is far from "love and peace", take for example the crusades: Christians killed MILLIONS of people just because they didn't share the same religion. And not only killed, but tortured, raped, pillaged, took all belongings of even those they let live and enslaved them. Now, where is "love and peace" about that? Or in modern times, how many times have you heard about Christians spewing hatred and bile about all the "non-conforming" people, like us non-heterosexuals for example? There are plenty of examples where homosexuals have been tortured and killed by the religious, even in modern-day society. Hell, _I_ have had people literally come up to my door and start chastising me about how my ways are horrible, vile and I only corrupt everyone and everything around me with them and how I will go to hell and whatnot; I sure as heck do not go to strangers' doors and start judging their views and tastes, so what the hell gives Christians the right to do that?!
"Love and peace" my ass; it's all about CONTROL.
People also get bent out of shape that they can't use science to prove God exists. Why should you be able to create a scientific experiment that could repetitively force the hand of God? That simply doesn't make sense. If God always did the same thing in the same situation, how is God any different than one of the cosmic laws he's made? You cannot reduce God into god-in-the-box, and you shouldn't be able to. Scripture even says you will not find God through worldly wisdom, but only through preaching.
That is exactly the logic fallacy of it all: you can just claim absolutely ANYTHING as "God's will", and that's that.
God is the only being in reality that can bring people to Heaven where there is peace, love, joy, and no suffering forever.
That is another example of a fallacy: human beings evaluate their environment and themselves through conflict. We NEED negative things to happen to us so we can appreciate the positive things. Without negative things we would not be able to appreciate the positive ones. If you never experience anything even mildly displeasing in your life you will simply become inherently bored as whatever you have will feel like nothing. So, in Heaven if there are only positive things and never EVER any kind of conflict then it cannot be a Heaven, atleast not for human beings. It is an oxymoron.
No other being can prevent infinite suffering besides God himself, so why would you want to judge his methods? He himself did not shy away from suffering himself, but died on the cross, proving how much he loves you.
Bible actually teaches that God and Jesus are two totally separate entities and that it is blasphemy to call Jesus a God. Perhaps you need some soul searching to be done.
What happens to people who don't know about Jesus? For example, anyone born before Jesus or raised without knowledge of him? Do they still get into Heaven when they die? Or do they go elsewhere?
I've also wondered about this and I've even asked some priests and theologists about it, and the most common answer is that they still don't get to Heaven. Now, when I then follow with the question "So basically God doesn't even give them people a chance to get into Heaven, they're doomed to go to Hell already way before they're even born into this world?" their answers usually just fall flat on their faces. Then the people who say those people will get to Heaven as they are innocent of the condition of not knowing about God don't know what to answer when I ask them the question: "Why do you people then even tell others about God? If you never went out to teach about God we'd all get to Heaven, whereas by telling them about God you're deliberately exposing them to Hell."
Coyne is unreasonable ...
And here this is a good thing, because you cannot reason with religious believers. This is why those guys usually have a big advantage: They are not bound by logic or reason, they can say the most crazy things and their followers swallow it dutifully. The only way to argue against them is to make fun of them. Which is what Coyne did.
What we have here is a false dichotomy. Many folks with religious beliefs merely believe that some things that aren't explained by science might be the hand of God, which is subtly but significantly different from the position you describe. Such an attitude does not mean that we should not use science to learn what we can, but rather shows a humble acceptance that some truths may be fundamentally impossible to grasp from within the confines of our universe. They would argue that we may never be able to explain why certain laws of the universe are true, but that does not mean that we should stop trying, as the more we learn about the universe, the more we inevitably learn about its creator.
The lazy use God as an excuse to stop trying. The true believers use God as a reason to do so. That's why throughout history, a fair amount of scientific discovery has been done by the Church and the faithful, from Copernicus to Mendel. Heck, even Sir Francis Bacon—to many, the founder of modern science—was religious.
While we're at it, let's add a few more to that list. Kepler, Galilei, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Kelvin, Planck, Einstein—you know, all those people who were so important to science that we named measurements, laws, or cages after most of them—all held some belief in a higher power, creator, or similar. Yet no sane person could claim that their impact on modern science was anything less than amazing and groundbreaking.
The fundamentalist-atheist claim that religion and science are fundamentally at odds is no less a religious belief than traditional theistic religions, and more to the point, is an utterly arrogant belief that effectively spits on the countless contributions of the religious to the very foundations of science as we know it today. And although it is held with the same arrogant religious fervor as the beliefs of the most devout faithful, it is a comically naïve belief built on nothing more solid than smugness and the believer's own desire to feel superior to someone else, usually to make themselves feel less inferior. Frankly, whenever I see such rubbish, it almost makes me ashamed of the human race as a whole.
As Einstein put it, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Claims to the contrary demand extraordinary proof.
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As I said, religion is arbitrary, you can claim whatever you want, so it is easy to come up with more arguments. But those arbitrary arguments are certainly not reasonable.
Nothing Coyne said had anything to do with science, reason or argument. He just made a big rant online with zero intellectual content whatsoever. He even cites the fact Slashdot featured his retarded rant as evidence he "won" the argument. Won the debate? So being featured on slashdot proves God doesn't exist? Seriously editors, what is this stupidity you're posting?
No, that's not it at all. It's the fundamentalist Christians (and at times, Catholics) that are out of hand. Fundamentalist atheists are just a reaction against them.
Tell a Hindu that the Earth doesn't sit on a turtle. They'll either laugh, or get offended that you stereotype them as a superstitious savage. Tell a Christian that the world is over a billion years old, and they will tell you that scientists only say that to get funding.
The scientific method *did* benefit from the immense skepticism against new discoveries. Arguing with Jesuits did have some benefit. But only once science started to get the upper hand. Before that point, we had the Dark Ages.
Many modern atheists have bad theology. They think: How does an all powerful and good God let bad things happen?
No, generally not. This isn't a question that we struggle with, or wonder about. It's like asking if Alice is going to go to the store tomorrow. If I don't believe that Alice exists, then I won't ask her to pick anything up for me, and so if Alice is presumed to be going to the store or not is completely irrelevant to me. However, the question is interesting to believers, and that's why we bring it up in debates with believers.
It's not even like we invented the question, Christians came up with it themselves. "Why does God let bad things happen to good people?" It's been asked longer than before the Book of Job was written. Except now there is an alternative answer to creation. Even if one of the people in the age of the Founding Fathers of the USA were to not believe in Christianity, there still wasn't any good explanation for the origin of life. They believed in a "Creator" because there just wasn't a better answer available to them.
But now we have no need for the hypothesis of a god. So, really now the situation becomes one of pure personal opinion. God/Religion is the why, and Science is the how. The problem is that there are still people out there asserting that God/Religion is the how, and that their holy scriptures are the infallible word of a deity.
So, in short, atheists don't have "bad theology", they don't have to deal with theology at all. Beyond simple, "there are in all likelihood no gods." We bring up these horribly difficult questions of theology, because you theists have been struggling with them for centuries, and the more we can get people to ponder them, and see the most rational explanation accounting for the apparent absence of any deity at all... the more converts we win.
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Well, yes. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this incident was the way that so many people automatically jumped to a wrong conclusion, without even considering that there might be another side to the story. In the last Slashdot discussion, nobody asked what Haught's opinion was. Nobody cared. They just assumed that the nasty creationist theologian had lost the debate and was trying to censor the result, which is a shameful conclusion to jump to.
You're an immobile computer, remember?
The one you want to be quoting in this debate would be Thomas Aquinas who, ~800 years ago, defined a set of rules that would allow Christianity and scientific inquiry to happily coexist. Which, apart from the odd extremist, they have been doing ever since.
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Although I'm sure many of the listed scientific luminaries were fully sincere in their faith, it's worth noting that it's only very recently that Atheism as a concept, let alone a life choice, came about. It would never have occurred to a number of these scientists that non-belief was even an option.
It is through their work however that our knowledge of the universe has grown to a degree where belief in a deity IS strictly optional and the number of serious scientists who profess faith in a Creator has diminished accordingly.
Tell a Christian that the world is over a billion years old, and they will tell you that scientists only say that to get funding.
I know some Christians online who would react as you describe, but tell any of the Christians I know personally that the world is over a billion years old and they will say "Yes, I know".
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Now, now, there's no need for facts on this site. All religions are creationists, all smart people that matter on the internet are evolutionists. You cannot debate unreasonable people because they are just wrong.
I'm also a Christian. (And not worried about karma... :) ) I came here for the tech news and got sucked into the wars... (Vi rules! Windows Sucks!)
But I would disagree with you, while I am not a deist, I do believe that the workings of the universe can be completely explained by science, down to the spooky stuff in Quantum Physics. If God is God, he is God of that too, but I don't think we ever need to look for a gap for God to fill in science. That to me diminishes God to nothing more than a cop out.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
Posts like these reveal the latest tactic in the religious fundamentalist PYSOPS campaign - the attempt to cast "science" (which is a process) as a "belief system" or "religion" and thus either elevating their religion to the same level as science or pulling science down to their level (whichever view you prefer)
Sometimes, the reveal is the use of the new portmanteau "sciencism" but other times - like in this case - it is more baldly stated.
The ironic thing is that I think this particular theme is meant as much in defence as it is offense; most religious fundies give each other a degree of professional courtesy and refrain from directly attacking each other's dogmas - you don't often see Bible Belters railing against Buddists. Perhaps they hope that if they can recast science as a belief system, science will extend that "professional courtesy" to them and leave them the hell alone.
Sadly, they are tilting at windmills; "science" does not care one whit about religious dogma. It's not even on the radar. What science "cares" about is the propogation of knowlege teased out through experiment. If religion contradicts this, science - quite rightly - seeks to correct the error (the same way science seeks to eliminate error from science).
If science winds up systemically dismembering religious dogmas, well, so much the worse for religion - but it isn't PURPOSEFUL.
The problem with religion is that it has made claims about the workings of the universe which are demonstratively, testably, and predictively FALSE - and they are still, after centuries of Enlightenment, still not equipped to deal with it.
So nice try - but we're on to this tactic too.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
I'm a staunch atheist, but the letter reads to me like Haught had some valid criticisms. In particular, the list of "evils" associated religion. You could easily come up with such a list for science. It's not pertinent to a debate on the compatibility of religion and science.
It'll be interesting to see the video. I'm glad Haught changed his mind, and I give him credit for that.
I'm a Christian. There, I said it. I've been hanging out on Slashdot for over 10 years. And I'm a Christian.
Heh. So what? The majority of slashdot readers are christians. There's a higher percentage of atheists here, but that's because there's a higher percentage of atheists among techies. That's still not a majority, you're just more likely to come across them on slashdot and get a reply.
I am a degreed engineer from one of the top private engineering schools in the country. I watch sci-fi. A lot. I believe in Evolution.
Ok.
I don't think humans evolved from pond scum OR monkeys.
What does that mean? You're commenting on how pond scum and monkeys are bad terms for the organic material in primordial earth and our primate ancestors? Or are you saying we don't come from those things? If you're saying we didn't evolve from these things, what did we evolve from? I mean, you believe in evolution, so you believe we evolved, right? Or did everything else evolve, and just not humans. Dude, that was confusing.
I believe in God. I believe he is on our side and is in favor of us. I believe God made the universe.
That's your prerogative, it's fine. I don't have a beef with that.
I believe in the Bible.
Literally? Because we have scientific evidence that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt the Bible is not literally true. If you want to believe they are allegories, you are free to believe that. If you want to believe in the literal creation story, the flood, and all that....well, you're being intellectually dishonest with yourself by ignoring evidence that goes against your beliefs.
I know strict interpretation of the Bible says the earth is 6000 years old. I wasn't there then, I'm not going to argue about it.
There are other dating methods, you don't need to be there. It's like watching one of the sci-fi movies you like and going, "they say they used cgi for the special effects, but I wasn't there for the filming. I'm not going to argue whether this is real or not."
As a Christian, an Engineer and a Technologist I point to the spooky stuff in Quantum Physics as an olive branch between the two camps.
"I don't understand Quantum Physics, so I think God has something to do with it." Pointing out things you don't understand doesn't prove it can't be understood. Same goes for things nobody understands. We understand a whole lot more about the universe now than we did 200 years ago, and we'll understand a whole lot more 200 years from now.
There is a God, and we don't understand enough things yet to make science agree with that.
If you want to take the existence of God as an axiom, you are completely free to do so. Just understand that you've done that. You've made a choice and said, "I believe God exists no matter what. I take it on faith that it's true." This prevents you from using stupid arguments trying to prove the existence of God, and it prevents others from trying to use stupid arguments to try to prove God doesn't exist. It's an unfalsifiable concept, it's not the realm of science. Always believe on evidence first. For everything else, you can have faith or not. Just don't try to force the rest of us to share your faith, and we'll get along fine. If anyone tries to force their lack of faith on you, I'll side with you on that. Even if I don't share your faith, I believe you have the right to lead the life you want according to the principles you hold dear.
Upon reading your post, I would classify you as agnostic, not atheist. At the risk of oversimplifying, I'd say agnosticism is usually a more principled stance; it inherently acknowledges that any intelligent actor can be mistaken or misled. Atheism, in its most strident form, is entirely faith-based; and in its more scientifically and philosophically defensible forms atheism tends to be difficult to distinguish from agnosticism or pantheism.
There are several religions that accept agnostic congregants, but the only explicitly agnostic religion I know of is one of the smaller Hindu sects. There are several atheist religions - the most interesting one is probably Jainism, which holds that any being that we would perceive as God is merely an extremely advanced person. Jains believe that they can perfect themselves morally, psychologically and philosophically and become as gods themselves. Jainism is much older than Christianity and still a vibrant living religious tradition, incidentally.
All excellent points.
But on top of that, for any given set of scientific "beliefs", you have the ability to personally replicate the experiment and see the results for yourself. While science says "trust me", it also expects (and, in fact, RELIES UPON) that some people will NOT trust, and insist on replicating and verifying the results.
No dogmatic religion permits this. Nobody is expected or allowed to attempt a virgin birth, to change water into wine, raise the dead etc etc etc.
Science encourages questions. Religion discourages it. That, to me, is THE key difference.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book