The odds of a global worldwide flood qua Noah are about on par with the odds that there are elves in my pants. The odds that there was not a worldwide flood qua Noah are about on par with the sun rising tomorrow morning.
At about the point that I would be happy to wager my life against a penny that a statement is correct, is about the time I'm okay saying something is false and disproved, or any other unequivocal language you want.
There is no God. To plead for the tiniest amount of agnosticism is rather silly in this case if you wouldn't also argue for some modicum of doubt in the statement that there is no dragon the size of New York in Denver.
Nonsense, after Newton we only really kind of understood 99%. I mean pick something and there 99 times out of a hundred we could probably have a pretty good handle on it.
I'm entirely gungho for science. I think we should keep testing the fringe and add more 9s to that number until what we don't understand requires such prohibitively expensive things to figure out that we can't really manage to make any economically coherent argument for doing such things and then do them anyway.
I mean, we only needed Newton to go to the moon. And to find something that Newton didn't explain required traveling to the other side of the Earth and photographing stars during the few seconds of a total eclipse. But, was it worth it? Of course! I'm simply saying we understand 99.99999% or so of the things we encounter but there's obviously some mindblowing stuff in that.00001% that may change our view of how the rest of it works.
I never ever said screw understanding things, I never suggested such for a moment. Just the opposite! Learn the truth, accept the truth, and damn the consequences. The LHC might well provide a glimmer of insight that really makes for a coherent explanation of the big bang and the physics which allow such events to happen without any needed intervention from divine sources. But, this consequence is irrelevant.
That'd likewise be a rather striking bit of counterevidence for religious claims. It's not like science is anti-religion. Science is simply tests claims against reality and disregards those claims which do not appear to be true and religion happens to be one of those claims which is regularly disregarded by science. A vast number of claims made by religious texts and religionists about religion are not true, even some very fundamental claims. Science doesn't oppose religion, it simply helps progress us from answers (99%) to less wrong answers (99.9%) to less wrong answers (99.99%) etc. And it seems that religion stopped being a plausible answer about the time that it necessitated a powerless God who never interacts with the world in order to try and salvage the claims as not manifestly false or absurd.
You can live your life quite well without science. A vast number of people in the US and elsewhere are scientifically illiterate and many of them, much to my dismay, suffer few ill effects from this. I mean, you can think the Earth is flat and it's rarely going to impact your life very directly, after all seems pretty flat when you're walking around on it. A curvature of 0 per mile is really close to a curvature of 0.000126 per mile. This just happens to be true. You can get along without science, but I wouldn't recommend it and claiming that I've ever said screw understanding things is as close to a lie as twilight is to night.
I love science with a passion. I love understanding the world and the universe. I eat quarks and gluons for breakfast, and travel hundreds of millions of miles a year in this little solar system we have and absolutely love the view.
The person above suggested it was simply an assumption that we live in a rational universe and that suggesting that God did it would imply a non-rational universe. In reality, for all we know and do not know, the universe has yet to do something categorically different from what it typically does. I have every reason to conclude that it will thusly work the same in the future as it does in the past. And the mere suggestion that God did it, doesn't imply that therefore we should chuck out the 99.99999% of everything that we're pretty sure isn't absurd.
It's absurd to say I went to the store in a UFO piloted by unicorns. But, he would have us accept that if I said God gave me that UFO, it's suddenly a reasonable thing to say! No. It's still an unreasonable thing to say because science still works. The fact that he's obliged, for religious reasons, to suggest that science doesn't mean anything is another strike against religion. It makes people say profoundly stupid things.
The question then becomes do you think that dark matter, dark energy, and quantum mechanics are required to explain something more often than 1 in 10,000,000 times? Do you think that any particular situation is that likely to be an edge condition?
There are some points out there where we have stuff to learn and it's interesting stuff, but 99.99999% of the time we encounter things we've seen before and have good understandings about. We have to search really hard and build really big machines to find those very rare edge conditions.
We can get it to the point that it's less likely that there was a global flood than it is to accept that the sun will rise in the morning. That the number of required ad hoc explanations required to suppose a global flood are so great as to make it laughable.
* I have encountered an open-minded person who didn't accept evolution. I know this because when I explained it to him, he found it compelling and accepted it. You could be open-minded and just very ignorant of the topic.
A very powerful or all-powerful being intervened and performed said action is a claim that could be scientifically found to be true. I mean, if God really existed and really did things I don't think it would necessarily need to be impossible for such things to be done. If God came to Earth and walked around and made some things fall upwards, in acceptable test conditions, to demonstrate his power I would accept that miracle is the cause.
But, for the most part I accept your comment. However my comment is simply about the assumptions that miracles are the cause. There are very few things commonplace things that we do not have good naturalistic explanations for and of those a great many of them previously had no naturalistic explanation and for a great many of those supernatural explanations were given. Of those supernatural explanations a total of zero panned out.
Only those things that are probable. No real scientist would make the claim you are making here now.
No science can disprove things, even those that are improbable. My desk will turn into a frog in two seconds. That's highly improbable and evidently false by it's failure to do such things. This is one of those things like claiming there was a global flood 4,000 years ago.
Religion says there was a global flood some 4,000 years ago.
You need to learn a thing or two about commanding the English language before you engage in this kind of crap.
You think that that statement is somehow misstated? It's a pretty basic metonymy. Am I to really be chided for the White House being unable to talk when I say that the White House said something?
Religion says there was a global flood. Science says that there was not.
Some religionists and religious texts make the claim... Some scientists make the claim...
I assumed my audience would understand this as it is meant, "there is a religious claim". A claim made by religious sources or people. Which is to say I assumed my audience would have a grasp of English.
First, which religion to begin with? You can't say "Religion says X" when we know for a fact that multiple religions do not abide by X.
Whichever religion makes the claim! When I say that science says the universe is expanding demanding to know which science and which scientists is rather silly. I'm not tacitly suggesting that geologists are busy making this claim. I'm using the word "Science" as a representation of something some scientists say with some scientific authority. It's metonymy, not poor English.
So you have be specific about which religion you are talking about.
No I don't. I'm talking about those that make the claim. When religion makes claim X, science makes claim ~X for this given X. Thus we can suggest there is some contradiction and some basis for claiming there is some conflict.
You are referring to a passage in the old testament, namely the Genesis.
I'm referring to a number of passages in Genesis. I think chapters 6-8 or so.
And this happens to a passage shared by many people in the Levant and Middle East, all the way back to the Sumerians.
The story itself is largely taken from the older Assyrian story of the Epic of Gilgamesh which itself predates the typical given date for the flood.
Now, and if had an understanding of religion, ancient literature and social anthropology (which you should if you ever want to engage in this type of discussions without talking out of your ass), you'll know that most major Christian religions teach that this passage should never be taking literally.
I'm actually quite well versed in most all of those areas of study and there is a very large segment of the US population that takes the Bible to be literally true. In fact, it's a majority.
A 2004 poll by ABC News found that 61% of people believe the story of the Ark is literally true. That it actually happened. Claiming that it's a minority opinion of "a few retarded fringe creationists" is a bit silly when on average if I pick a random person on the street there's a better than half chance that they accept that Noah's Ark story really happened.
This is actually written as foot notes in the passages of many bibles.
Some like the NIV point out things like the forged NT letters, Noah's Ark, or that Exodus never happened and offer some general apologetics in places. This doesn't stop people from believing that they are literally true as the majority of people in the US do seem to believe it
Most of space and matter is just space and matter and is explained by a few rather easy to understand rules. There's very little of the universe that actually doesn't make any sense to us. It's usually very small and limited examples of things which are yet to be explained. Given 10 million objects we're pretty sure that 99.99999% of them obey the laws of physics.
By absurd, I mean to say that it's consistent. The half-life of Carbon-14 isn't 5,700 one day and 5 seconds the next day. We live in a world where things are consistent and so long as things are consistent we can suppose that there is not yet evidence than an all-powerful God is waiting in the wings to turn jello into jet fuel and make objects start falling up. Claiming that the world is absurd because you're claiming the world is absurd and therefore the evidence that suggests it's not absurd is untrustworthy, does go against the evidence.
I daresay by crazy you mean to say that the laws of thermodynamics suddenly stop being true from time to time? Because that's what needs to be crazy for the consistency of science to fail.
No. I'm an atheist, not because I have proof there is no God, but rather because I understand the evidence for God is on par with the evidence for werewolves.
Do you believe in God? -- If you say no... then you're an atheist whether you actively disbelieve in God or not is a different point altogether. Feel free to look up the difference between strong and weak atheism but anything that isn't an active belief in God is atheism.
If I said I went to the store in an alien spacecraft piloted by unicorns that would be absurd, but if I said that said spacecraft was given to me by God that would suddenly make the claim reasonable?
Science can actually test the absurdity of such notions. We really can see that science properly explains 99.9999% of the universe and that it does this at least 99.9999% of the time (as we are unsure whether that last bit is unexplained or some inherent absurdity). So at the very least we can see that all things are equal at least within the same order of magnitude that science is effective. So the whole affair seems to be pretty strongly leaning toward the effective. So science tends to rely on the assumption that the future is going to be like the past and because the past has never been completely ridiculous the future is likely not going to suddenly become ridiculous. Which, as far as assumptions go, is only on as solid ground as the assumption that the sun will rise in the morning. Which isn't something I'd bet against.
The scale is weighted. If people sound like they are denying the truth of religion, they are clearly evil atheists attacking religion. When a study asks scientists about their opinions and they say they don't attack religion that clearly means scientists are pro-religion and those really evil atheists are making waves.
It's like making your own boogie man and then blaming the characterization of said boogie man on that evil boogie man.
Religionist: "Religion doesn't agree with religious poppycock! It's attacking religion! Those scientists are attacking religion!"
Scientists: "We're not attacking religion."
Religionist: "Science supports religion, it's those evil non-religious people who keep trying to use it unjustly as a tool to further their agenda!"
It makes you wonder, what exactly could make somebody think that science is anti-religion? I mean, disproving all the crap they try to claim is true isn't enough, all the scientists have to dedicate their lives to fighting religion? Then the religionists will just come back saying: "Gee, you're spending a lot of time fighting something you don't believe in, you must really believe it!" -- FFS.
So clearly the answer is to make a super-awesome MMORPG where programming is treated like spell casting and the best programmers are the most bad-ass mofos in the game.
Like allow them to code their pets...
On Move: Master:: move Master.direction On Summon: Master:: summon Master On Attack: Self:: flee On Attack: Master:: rescue Master On FireBall: Master:: cast "shield" master
Also, it might be sort of awesome to make potion brewing a bit like chemistry and require some heavy duty science to figure it out. Like knowing exactly how much of each ingredient is required to brew a functional potion because the molar weights need to be perfect. etc.
We find out who these religious scientists are, out them as religious, and then all point and laugh.
Witch hunting is less fun when you're not battling the forces of evil by stripping young girls and inspecting their breasts and genitalia for witch marks, and that whole witchcraft is bunk thing sure takes some wind from the sails. But, we could still point and laugh I suppose.
You apparently DO have to go pretty far to find examples of educated scientists responsible for many deaths if you have to scrape Maj. Hasan from the bottom of the barrel or maligning the physicists at Los Alamos (they didn't specifically use the bomb, and using them likely saved lives).
But, that said, Dr. Amy Bishop did fairly recently shoot some of her colleagues after being denied tenure. However, in many of those cases it doesn't seem to be over any sort of "intellectual" debate. I mean, I've had people threaten to murder me for disagreeing with them on the topic of religion, I've never had that happen on any science topic.
The only requirement for being a Christian is following (the example set by) Christ.
I've met enough Christians to doubt this statement. I must either doubt this statement or agree with Nietzsche, "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross."
Cherry-picking is probably a good idea. It's best to have a religion that shouldn't embarrass you to show to your neighbors.
I think the only real requirement for being Christian is self-proclamation and not thinking the entire thing is stupid.
Basically on the question whether or not the people writing those old stories had some insight that we only rediscover. I mean, "let there be light", isn't it a lot like what we envision the Big Bang to be? On a level that a more "primitive" human could understand?
The answer turns out to be no. People writing those old stories seem to have scientific knowledge on par (and even below) others of their day and age. And no, "let there be light" is nothing like the Big Bang with the exception of perhaps light sometime after the formation of stars some number of millions of years later.
Sadly the books are worse. It's really about a bunch of arm waving and then claiming there's some room left for magic. Basically if you contort your theology and your science you can almost hammer that square peg into that round hole.
Onward Christian Soldiers marching as to war with the cross of Jesus ready to turn the other cheek? And while Buddhists may not be the first suspects of flying planes into buildings to kill people, a lot of them turn out to be plenty ready to fly planes into ships to kill people.
The question isn't really whether people will do inhumane things in the name of religion from the inquisition, to the witch burnings, to modern day Jihadists. Or whether good people do good for the sake of doing good. Bill Gates is the biggest philanthropist in the world by a large margin and he's non-religious. The question are those things in-between those things which can make good people to evil deeds with smiles on their faces. Often the motivations for such things are religious motivations. It's not as if witch burners were killing people just to steal their homes and money and property (though that did play a role), some of them were battling the evil forces of a perceived Satanic onslaught.
Oh, and you probably haven't seen that many Christian charities in the act of you think they don't demand quid pro quo. The typical rule is "if you don't pray, you don't eat."
Okay, that will be fun! Just make sure to follow GP's rules about creation myth and miracles. Saying "miracles are unscientific, thus impossible" is like saying "peanutbutter is not meat, thus indigestible." I'm also adding chapters to your quotes.
It isn't that miracles are specifically unscientific but rather because they have never, in the entire history of the world, been the answer to anything ever. Nothing that was previously mysterious and is now no longer mysterious was found to be miraculous. It's like having two race horses called "Natural-Explanations" and "Miracles" and having run a few million races we find that "Miracles" has never ever ever won any race ever. Is it therefore probably not the horse to bet on.
This is quite accurate. Dr. Hector Avalos has pointed out that the cause of religious wars are almost always scarcity of resources even if those resources are invented. Like holy land or scriptural inclusions, there's only so much this very special godly thing to go around. What strife there is caused by religion is largely due to purely human desire for particular resources. Scarce resources probably trumps ambition by a lot.
For example, we have carbon dating techniques and other methods of dating that say we've found dinosaur bones that are some number of million years old.
Dating on dinosaur bones is typically done via some other type of radiometric dating of volcanic bits in the soil around the bones. You can't really carbon date something that 1) doesn't have carbon (the bone is turned into rock) and 2) is older than 50,000 years old (carbon 14 has a half-life of about 5,700 years and after about 10 generations there's only like 1/1000th of the original carbon there).
So you can't really carbon date non-organic really old things.
Also, yeah, you can explore some questions of God via science. The religion that says that volcanoes or the sun is magical or that stars are gods, can pretty well be discounted. It depends a lot on how silly your particular God happens to be. If you hide your God well enough, maybe you could avoid having a deity with any relationship or interaction with any of reality. If you could make a God that is entirely irrelevant, you could have a God that is unable to be explored via science.
It depends largely on which God and whether you make any claims about reality. Science answers the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions and religion tries to avoid making questions possible.
You can. It depends on the religion. When you disprove them, they tend to move the goal posts. Arguing with people who are just making up new crap to defend their old crap, aren't exactly going to be time well spent. The fact that you "can't prove it wrong" usually in science is a sign of a good theory, but being unable to prove it wrong because it's a moving target that gets more vague when you test some premises usually means it's complete crock that somebody just likes.
I mean, at present we can't prove string theory wrong but it's not entirely a waste of time. We might suss out something to check and if not, we invented a lot of really fun math to deal with the question. It depends a lot on why you can't prove it wrong.
No. Science can disprove things. It's the one thing it's actually good it. It's basically a process whereby you guess, figure out what the consequences are of that guess, and then see if those consequences exist within reality. And, most importantly, if it doesn't mesh properly with reality it is wrong, absolutely false, no matter how much you love it.
Religion says there was a global flood some 4,000 years ago. Science is pretty much the goto-source for calling "bullshit". The fact that you could make up ad hoc and ex post facto reasons to wishy-washy the issue means your theory is crap to begin with. You don't special plead truth into existence.
You make it sound like science is responsible for every improvement in the quality of life for the last three thousand years. Why do you wrongly discount all the amazing true understandings and technology provided by religion like the......... or the......... well science isn't responsible for the............
Hm. Okay maybe you're on to something. It's not just any particular advancements but it seems like, without science, the only direction you can go is backwards.
Slashdot Mirror
But only because you've blown my mind!
The odds of a global worldwide flood qua Noah are about on par with the odds that there are elves in my pants. The odds that there was not a worldwide flood qua Noah are about on par with the sun rising tomorrow morning.
At about the point that I would be happy to wager my life against a penny that a statement is correct, is about the time I'm okay saying something is false and disproved, or any other unequivocal language you want.
There is no God. To plead for the tiniest amount of agnosticism is rather silly in this case if you wouldn't also argue for some modicum of doubt in the statement that there is no dragon the size of New York in Denver.
Nonsense, after Newton we only really kind of understood 99%. I mean pick something and there 99 times out of a hundred we could probably have a pretty good handle on it.
I'm entirely gungho for science. I think we should keep testing the fringe and add more 9s to that number until what we don't understand requires such prohibitively expensive things to figure out that we can't really manage to make any economically coherent argument for doing such things and then do them anyway.
I mean, we only needed Newton to go to the moon. And to find something that Newton didn't explain required traveling to the other side of the Earth and photographing stars during the few seconds of a total eclipse. But, was it worth it? Of course! I'm simply saying we understand 99.99999% or so of the things we encounter but there's obviously some mindblowing stuff in that .00001% that may change our view of how the rest of it works.
I never ever said screw understanding things, I never suggested such for a moment. Just the opposite! Learn the truth, accept the truth, and damn the consequences. The LHC might well provide a glimmer of insight that really makes for a coherent explanation of the big bang and the physics which allow such events to happen without any needed intervention from divine sources. But, this consequence is irrelevant.
That'd likewise be a rather striking bit of counterevidence for religious claims. It's not like science is anti-religion. Science is simply tests claims against reality and disregards those claims which do not appear to be true and religion happens to be one of those claims which is regularly disregarded by science. A vast number of claims made by religious texts and religionists about religion are not true, even some very fundamental claims. Science doesn't oppose religion, it simply helps progress us from answers (99%) to less wrong answers (99.9%) to less wrong answers (99.99%) etc. And it seems that religion stopped being a plausible answer about the time that it necessitated a powerless God who never interacts with the world in order to try and salvage the claims as not manifestly false or absurd.
You can live your life quite well without science. A vast number of people in the US and elsewhere are scientifically illiterate and many of them, much to my dismay, suffer few ill effects from this. I mean, you can think the Earth is flat and it's rarely going to impact your life very directly, after all seems pretty flat when you're walking around on it. A curvature of 0 per mile is really close to a curvature of 0.000126 per mile. This just happens to be true. You can get along without science, but I wouldn't recommend it and claiming that I've ever said screw understanding things is as close to a lie as twilight is to night.
I love science with a passion. I love understanding the world and the universe. I eat quarks and gluons for breakfast, and travel hundreds of millions of miles a year in this little solar system we have and absolutely love the view.
The person above suggested it was simply an assumption that we live in a rational universe and that suggesting that God did it would imply a non-rational universe. In reality, for all we know and do not know, the universe has yet to do something categorically different from what it typically does. I have every reason to conclude that it will thusly work the same in the future as it does in the past. And the mere suggestion that God did it, doesn't imply that therefore we should chuck out the 99.99999% of everything that we're pretty sure isn't absurd.
It's absurd to say I went to the store in a UFO piloted by unicorns. But, he would have us accept that if I said God gave me that UFO, it's suddenly a reasonable thing to say! No. It's still an unreasonable thing to say because science still works. The fact that he's obliged, for religious reasons, to suggest that science doesn't mean anything is another strike against religion. It makes people say profoundly stupid things.
Science isn't a
The question then becomes do you think that dark matter, dark energy, and quantum mechanics are required to explain something more often than 1 in 10,000,000 times? Do you think that any particular situation is that likely to be an edge condition?
There are some points out there where we have stuff to learn and it's interesting stuff, but 99.99999% of the time we encounter things we've seen before and have good understandings about. We have to search really hard and build really big machines to find those very rare edge conditions.
We can get it to the point that it's less likely that there was a global flood than it is to accept that the sun will rise in the morning. That the number of required ad hoc explanations required to suppose a global flood are so great as to make it laughable.
* I have encountered an open-minded person who didn't accept evolution. I know this because when I explained it to him, he found it compelling and accepted it. You could be open-minded and just very ignorant of the topic.
A very powerful or all-powerful being intervened and performed said action is a claim that could be scientifically found to be true. I mean, if God really existed and really did things I don't think it would necessarily need to be impossible for such things to be done. If God came to Earth and walked around and made some things fall upwards, in acceptable test conditions, to demonstrate his power I would accept that miracle is the cause.
But, for the most part I accept your comment. However my comment is simply about the assumptions that miracles are the cause. There are very few things commonplace things that we do not have good naturalistic explanations for and of those a great many of them previously had no naturalistic explanation and for a great many of those supernatural explanations were given. Of those supernatural explanations a total of zero panned out.
Only those things that are probable. No real scientist would make the claim you are making here now.
No science can disprove things, even those that are improbable. My desk will turn into a frog in two seconds. That's highly improbable and evidently false by it's failure to do such things. This is one of those things like claiming there was a global flood 4,000 years ago.
Religion says there was a global flood some 4,000 years ago.
You need to learn a thing or two about commanding the English language before you engage in this kind of crap.
You think that that statement is somehow misstated? It's a pretty basic metonymy. Am I to really be chided for the White House being unable to talk when I say that the White House said something?
Religion says there was a global flood.
Science says that there was not.
Some religionists and religious texts make the claim...
Some scientists make the claim...
I assumed my audience would understand this as it is meant, "there is a religious claim". A claim made by religious sources or people. Which is to say I assumed my audience would have a grasp of English.
First, which religion to begin with? You can't say "Religion says X" when we know for a fact that multiple religions do not abide by X.
Whichever religion makes the claim! When I say that science says the universe is expanding demanding to know which science and which scientists is rather silly. I'm not tacitly suggesting that geologists are busy making this claim. I'm using the word "Science" as a representation of something some scientists say with some scientific authority. It's metonymy, not poor English.
So you have be specific about which religion you are talking about.
No I don't. I'm talking about those that make the claim. When religion makes claim X, science makes claim ~X for this given X. Thus we can suggest there is some contradiction and some basis for claiming there is some conflict.
You are referring to a passage in the old testament, namely the Genesis.
I'm referring to a number of passages in Genesis. I think chapters 6-8 or so.
And this happens to a passage shared by many people in the Levant and Middle East, all the way back to the Sumerians.
The story itself is largely taken from the older Assyrian story of the Epic of Gilgamesh which itself predates the typical given date for the flood.
Now, and if had an understanding of religion, ancient literature and social anthropology (which you should if you ever want to engage in this type of discussions without talking out of your ass), you'll know that most major Christian religions teach that this passage should never be taking literally.
I'm actually quite well versed in most all of those areas of study and there is a very large segment of the US population that takes the Bible to be literally true. In fact, it's a majority.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/us/views_of_bible_poll_040216.html
A 2004 poll by ABC News found that 61% of people believe the story of the Ark is literally true. That it actually happened. Claiming that it's a minority opinion of "a few retarded fringe creationists" is a bit silly when on average if I pick a random person on the street there's a better than half chance that they accept that Noah's Ark story really happened.
This is actually written as foot notes in the passages of many bibles.
Some like the NIV point out things like the forged NT letters, Noah's Ark, or that Exodus never happened and offer some general apologetics in places. This doesn't stop people from believing that they are literally true as the majority of people in the US do seem to believe it
Most of space and matter is just space and matter and is explained by a few rather easy to understand rules. There's very little of the universe that actually doesn't make any sense to us. It's usually very small and limited examples of things which are yet to be explained. Given 10 million objects we're pretty sure that 99.99999% of them obey the laws of physics.
By absurd, I mean to say that it's consistent. The half-life of Carbon-14 isn't 5,700 one day and 5 seconds the next day. We live in a world where things are consistent and so long as things are consistent we can suppose that there is not yet evidence than an all-powerful God is waiting in the wings to turn jello into jet fuel and make objects start falling up. Claiming that the world is absurd because you're claiming the world is absurd and therefore the evidence that suggests it's not absurd is untrustworthy, does go against the evidence.
I daresay by crazy you mean to say that the laws of thermodynamics suddenly stop being true from time to time? Because that's what needs to be crazy for the consistency of science to fail.
No. I'm an atheist, not because I have proof there is no God, but rather because I understand the evidence for God is on par with the evidence for werewolves.
Do you believe in God?
-- If you say no... then you're an atheist whether you actively disbelieve in God or not is a different point altogether. Feel free to look up the difference between strong and weak atheism but anything that isn't an active belief in God is atheism.
If I said I went to the store in an alien spacecraft piloted by unicorns that would be absurd, but if I said that said spacecraft was given to me by God that would suddenly make the claim reasonable?
Science can actually test the absurdity of such notions. We really can see that science properly explains 99.9999% of the universe and that it does this at least 99.9999% of the time (as we are unsure whether that last bit is unexplained or some inherent absurdity). So at the very least we can see that all things are equal at least within the same order of magnitude that science is effective. So the whole affair seems to be pretty strongly leaning toward the effective. So science tends to rely on the assumption that the future is going to be like the past and because the past has never been completely ridiculous the future is likely not going to suddenly become ridiculous. Which, as far as assumptions go, is only on as solid ground as the assumption that the sun will rise in the morning. Which isn't something I'd bet against.
The scale is weighted. If people sound like they are denying the truth of religion, they are clearly evil atheists attacking religion. When a study asks scientists about their opinions and they say they don't attack religion that clearly means scientists are pro-religion and those really evil atheists are making waves.
It's like making your own boogie man and then blaming the characterization of said boogie man on that evil boogie man.
Religionist: "Religion doesn't agree with religious poppycock! It's attacking religion! Those scientists are attacking religion!"
Scientists: "We're not attacking religion."
Religionist: "Science supports religion, it's those evil non-religious people who keep trying to use it unjustly as a tool to further their agenda!"
It makes you wonder, what exactly could make somebody think that science is anti-religion? I mean, disproving all the crap they try to claim is true isn't enough, all the scientists have to dedicate their lives to fighting religion? Then the religionists will just come back saying: "Gee, you're spending a lot of time fighting something you don't believe in, you must really believe it!" -- FFS.
So clearly the answer is to make a super-awesome MMORPG where programming is treated like spell casting and the best programmers are the most bad-ass mofos in the game.
Like allow them to code their pets...
On Move: Master:: move Master.direction
On Summon: Master:: summon Master
On Attack: Self:: flee
On Attack: Master:: rescue Master
On FireBall: Master:: cast "shield" master
Also, it might be sort of awesome to make potion brewing a bit like chemistry and require some heavy duty science to figure it out. Like knowing exactly how much of each ingredient is required to brew a functional potion because the molar weights need to be perfect. etc.
I say we organize a witch hunt.
We find out who these religious scientists are, out them as religious, and then all point and laugh.
Witch hunting is less fun when you're not battling the forces of evil by stripping young girls and inspecting their breasts and genitalia for witch marks, and that whole witchcraft is bunk thing sure takes some wind from the sails. But, we could still point and laugh I suppose.
You apparently DO have to go pretty far to find examples of educated scientists responsible for many deaths if you have to scrape Maj. Hasan from the bottom of the barrel or maligning the physicists at Los Alamos (they didn't specifically use the bomb, and using them likely saved lives).
But, that said, Dr. Amy Bishop did fairly recently shoot some of her colleagues after being denied tenure. However, in many of those cases it doesn't seem to be over any sort of "intellectual" debate. I mean, I've had people threaten to murder me for disagreeing with them on the topic of religion, I've never had that happen on any science topic.
Actually the studies show that they accept them except when they disagree with their religious or political beliefs.
The only requirement for being a Christian is following (the example set by) Christ.
I've met enough Christians to doubt this statement. I must either doubt this statement or agree with Nietzsche, "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross."
Cherry-picking is probably a good idea. It's best to have a religion that shouldn't embarrass you to show to your neighbors.
I think the only real requirement for being Christian is self-proclamation and not thinking the entire thing is stupid.
Basically on the question whether or not the people writing those old stories had some insight that we only rediscover. I mean, "let there be light", isn't it a lot like what we envision the Big Bang to be? On a level that a more "primitive" human could understand?
The answer turns out to be no. People writing those old stories seem to have scientific knowledge on par (and even below) others of their day and age. And no, "let there be light" is nothing like the Big Bang with the exception of perhaps light sometime after the formation of stars some number of millions of years later.
Sadly the books are worse. It's really about a bunch of arm waving and then claiming there's some room left for magic. Basically if you contort your theology and your science you can almost hammer that square peg into that round hole.
Onward Christian Soldiers marching as to war with the cross of Jesus ready to turn the other cheek? And while Buddhists may not be the first suspects of flying planes into buildings to kill people, a lot of them turn out to be plenty ready to fly planes into ships to kill people.
The question isn't really whether people will do inhumane things in the name of religion from the inquisition, to the witch burnings, to modern day Jihadists. Or whether good people do good for the sake of doing good. Bill Gates is the biggest philanthropist in the world by a large margin and he's non-religious. The question are those things in-between those things which can make good people to evil deeds with smiles on their faces. Often the motivations for such things are religious motivations. It's not as if witch burners were killing people just to steal their homes and money and property (though that did play a role), some of them were battling the evil forces of a perceived Satanic onslaught.
Oh, and you probably haven't seen that many Christian charities in the act of you think they don't demand quid pro quo. The typical rule is "if you don't pray, you don't eat."
Okay, that will be fun! Just make sure to follow GP's rules about creation myth and miracles. Saying "miracles are unscientific, thus impossible" is like saying "peanutbutter is not meat, thus indigestible." I'm also adding chapters to your quotes.
It isn't that miracles are specifically unscientific but rather because they have never, in the entire history of the world, been the answer to anything ever. Nothing that was previously mysterious and is now no longer mysterious was found to be miraculous. It's like having two race horses called "Natural-Explanations" and "Miracles" and having run a few million races we find that "Miracles" has never ever ever won any race ever. Is it therefore probably not the horse to bet on.
This is quite accurate. Dr. Hector Avalos has pointed out that the cause of religious wars are almost always scarcity of resources even if those resources are invented. Like holy land or scriptural inclusions, there's only so much this very special godly thing to go around. What strife there is caused by religion is largely due to purely human desire for particular resources. Scarce resources probably trumps ambition by a lot.
For example, we have carbon dating techniques and other methods of dating that say we've found dinosaur bones that are some number of million years old.
Dating on dinosaur bones is typically done via some other type of radiometric dating of volcanic bits in the soil around the bones. You can't really carbon date something that 1) doesn't have carbon (the bone is turned into rock) and 2) is older than 50,000 years old (carbon 14 has a half-life of about 5,700 years and after about 10 generations there's only like 1/1000th of the original carbon there).
So you can't really carbon date non-organic really old things.
Also, yeah, you can explore some questions of God via science. The religion that says that volcanoes or the sun is magical or that stars are gods, can pretty well be discounted. It depends a lot on how silly your particular God happens to be. If you hide your God well enough, maybe you could avoid having a deity with any relationship or interaction with any of reality. If you could make a God that is entirely irrelevant, you could have a God that is unable to be explored via science.
It depends largely on which God and whether you make any claims about reality. Science answers the who, what, where, when, why, and how questions and religion tries to avoid making questions possible.
You can. It depends on the religion. When you disprove them, they tend to move the goal posts. Arguing with people who are just making up new crap to defend their old crap, aren't exactly going to be time well spent. The fact that you "can't prove it wrong" usually in science is a sign of a good theory, but being unable to prove it wrong because it's a moving target that gets more vague when you test some premises usually means it's complete crock that somebody just likes.
I mean, at present we can't prove string theory wrong but it's not entirely a waste of time. We might suss out something to check and if not, we invented a lot of really fun math to deal with the question. It depends a lot on why you can't prove it wrong.
No. Science can disprove things. It's the one thing it's actually good it. It's basically a process whereby you guess, figure out what the consequences are of that guess, and then see if those consequences exist within reality. And, most importantly, if it doesn't mesh properly with reality it is wrong, absolutely false, no matter how much you love it.
Religion says there was a global flood some 4,000 years ago. Science is pretty much the goto-source for calling "bullshit". The fact that you could make up ad hoc and ex post facto reasons to wishy-washy the issue means your theory is crap to begin with. You don't special plead truth into existence.
You make it sound like science is responsible for every improvement in the quality of life for the last three thousand years. Why do you wrongly discount all the amazing true understandings and technology provided by religion like the ... ... ... or the ... ... ... well science isn't responsible for the ... ... ... ...
Hm. Okay maybe you're on to something. It's not just any particular advancements but it seems like, without science, the only direction you can go is backwards.