I think that 500 years ago, the Catholic Church was worried about its slipping political control. You could be killed/tortured for challenging that control. If the Catholic Church didn't recognize that the Earth wasn't really 6000 years old, this was because there was no evidence otherwise. This doesn't mean that it didn't read large parts of the Bible as allegory.
For example, I remember reading Augustine referring to the "stories" of the old testament in 300 ad. He says he initially thought them to be simple childrens stories, unable to compare to the other ancient classics, but that with more readings, his appreciation of them grew.
I don't know a whole lot about Biblical history, but I sometimes wonder if ancient and medieval readers of the Bible would be unable to even appreciate what we mean by "reading the Bible literally", which seems to me to be a statement very influenced by enlightment thinking (even if it is enlightment thinking gone wrong.)
I think the core to western religion is hope, and personal transformation. Historically most lettered people have read the Bible as allegory, including those of ancient times. The assertion made with Jesus' alleged miracles is that he is a figure of hope and healing. It does not try to provide an experimental justification of the existence of God.
>> From a scientific standpoint it doesn't matter. All the "laws" we have now are essentially just best guesses made on available data.
I disagree with this. I have never liked the description of the transition from classical to modern mechanics as finding Newton to be a special case. If this were true then it seems to me that quantum mechanics would not be so similar to classical mechanics, although I'm not sure exactly what I mean by that. We should not be able to understand it in quasi-classical terms, I guess. It should be utterly alien, like trying to use Hooke's law to describe a physical spring that has stretched too far.
I agree with you, but I think that what you describe applies only to what might be called scientific discovery, which is often a rather messy, creative endeavor, as opposed to what might be called scientific verification, where better understood theories are refined and retested. (Of course, the two aspects overlap.) Unless you study science pretty extensively you don't usually get exposed as much to the creative side of science, which I think is a shame.
The space age is great. It lets us all see that we live on the same small world. One that could, in princple, be accidently blown up by a careless, nearby black hole.
I thought teleology was a metaphysical subject about which natural selection had to be agnostic. In any case, I know that most of the time my actions don't produce the result I had in mind for them!
Actually, the Greek's had pretty good evidence for an Earth-centered universe. They knew that stars appear fixed relative to each other. They also had a decent estimate of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Then they knew that for the Earth to be in motion around the sun that the distance from the Earth to the stars would have to be absolutely enormous. To them such a large universe seemed absurd.
The epicycles didn't bother them so much. They were still composed of circles, which were considered a "good" shape. In any case, Ptolemy's observational astronomy was only superficially similar to a modern scientific theory. The great thinkers back then would have believed it in the same sense that we currently believe in a scientific theory. (Sort of like Genesis.)
I agree he could have been more diplomatic. Still, it is pretty crappy to let a student (an undergrad if I recall) publish a now embarrassing proof with an error that is apparently pretty obvious to an expert. That is sort of how I read this comment.
Sorry, I was replying to what I read as the GP post claim. To claim that all 21st century atheists believe that they are perfectly rational would surely be a gross oversimplification of a position that I am sure is as rich and varied as the many people who subscribe to it. However, I get similarly annoyed when people simplify the !(21st century atheist) position, which includes everyone from Jerry Falwell to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich to Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein. With one exception (I'll let you guess which...) these are not stupid people, and I think it is sort of an insult to them to sum up their position as "fairies and magic teapots and the flying spaghetti monster." Terry Eagleton does a better job of criticizing this sort of behavior than I can. (And no, I don't get about 1/4 of the allusions he makes in that review:-)).
I didn't assert the "existence" of original sin; like you, I'm not even sure what that means. I think original sin is useful as a metaphor for trying to understand history. If you are going to be so literal, then we probably can't have a very fruitful discussion; you should probably go talk to the Biblical fundamentalists:-). Certainly we can't test the metaphor original sin like, eg, the atmoic theory of matter. I am a physicist, and am well aware of what is scientifically testable and what is not. If you want to dismiss all discussions that don't fall in the former category as vague nonsense, then that is your choice. As for me, I happen to think Art and Science are equally worthwhile (even though I can only do one of them.)
Except that real science doesn't work that way. It isn't an empirical analogue to a mathematical proof. In practice, any scientific theory (or individual experiment) involves many different assumptions that cannot be easily tested individually. Instead the entire conceptual framework is assumed and then is tested for self-consistency, and for consistency with experiment. This has many similarities to the historical, "orthodox" meaning of faith. To think correctly, one had to assume the existence of God. However, after making that assumption, rational faculties would allow the believer to confirm the consistency of this belief. While their methods of confirmation did and do differ from those used in science in very large, important ways, I do not see the same perfect dichotomy that you do. I think you are oversimplifying.
That's an outright lie....
Have you ever actually done any scientific research? If we are going to characterize "faith" as irrational stubbornness, then faith is needed in spades to get anything accomplished in science. If nothing else, science requires faith that the universe will turn out to be intelligible.
That's a strawman argument....
Um, OK. That's not what your original post said , though. You said "all knowledge is derived from evidence and logic EXCEPT knowledge pertaining to topics they have been indoctrinated from birth to accept due to faith". In any case, historically empiricism different from rationalism in that it did not ground knowledge in pure reason. So to my knowledge of philosophy (and I am not a philosopher) you are still wrong.
Einstein is quoted as saying he believed in Spinoza's God. Spinoza was a pantheist. While Einstein did not believe in a personal God, he can be considered an atheist only from a Dawkins-manichean-esque perspective where everyone has to be either a Bible-thumping fundamentalist, or someone who makes fun of those Bible-thumping fundamentalists.
Only 19th+ century fundamentalists are unimaginative enough to read Genesis as a set of supernatural claims. (Maybe in another thousand years groups will consider Romeo and Juliet a parable warning parents to let their kids date who they want to.) Creationists take the differences between science and religion and push them under the rug; I claim you are caricaturizing them. Science is only retrospectively based on evidence and consensus. Scientific discovery requires as much faith as any religion. And religion does not ignore evidence. The progression from sacrificing first born children at the altar of Baal to secular government and nonviolent resistence has not been a random walk.
As for cognitive dissonance: I consider myself a "moderately" religious person. I do not blindly believe in Genesis. However, when I see how violence propogates itself through generations in the middle east and elsewhere, I cannot believe that idea of original sin does not resonate with some Truth. Certainly Adam and Eve were not real, but a quantum mechanical wavefunction may not be real either.
My life is filled with actions and belief not based on evidence or logic though. For example, I could probably fill pages with the strange rituals I use to beg microsoft software products to not crash. No, I think cognitive dissonance is believing that throughout history all human behavior has been dominated by irrational beliefs, except for 21st century atheists.
Entropy is defined in terms of counted states- it is to be proportional to the number of microstates compatible with a given system's macrostate. k*Log[N].Maybe someone somewhere has a definition of complexity that is meaningful for, eg, atoms in a lattice, or a computer program. That's very different from an amoeba or a person. If you can't measure it (at least in principle) then it isn't science.
How do you measure a quantity for complexity? Physics defines entropy, which is sort of related to what people mean by complexity. I wouldn't guess, though, that most practicing biologists even know the mathematical definition for entropy. Darwin certainly didn't know the modern definition since it had not been invented/discovered yet. When you want to philosophize about science, which I think is a worthy endeavor, then yes, I would think you want to talk about complexity. If you are doing a modern, natural scientific experiment, though, you need to work with quantities that can be measured, directly or indirectly, in well defined ways.
A laboratory has never produced revolved a planet around a star. We don't doubt that it is happening. Evolution is like that. It is a fact of the fossil record.
Certain details about the mechanism of evolution are not all completely understood. For example, evolution seems to speed up as the complexity of the organism increases. The 40000+ generations of your E-coli are nothing on a geological time scale.
To understand all the apparent difficulties with any scientific theory is difficult. If many people are not convinced of evolution: fine. My guess is that if, eg, quantum mechanics were more accessible, they wouldn't be convinced of it either. This doesn't mean the professionals are wrong.
I think the analysis of Russia is completely wrong. The Czar was close to God. The Caesar WAS a God. And the divinity of Caesar was nothing compared to that of Pharoah or the Chinese Emporer. And in any case, divine right to rule is Germanic in origin. It does not come from Christianity. Before Christianity were the Greek Gods. We may have now so refined the idea of God that He no longer exists, but He is no longer a human being, either. Christianity is part of that process.
Life doesn't "not intend" to evolve any more than balls do not intend to roll down a hill. Scientifically this is a nonsensical question, like wondering whether cold is red or blue. Belief in a mechanistic world motivated development of the scientific method. Belief that the Sun is a fitting home for God motivated Kepler to develop his laws of planetary motion. Neither of these beliefs are scientific.
Also, evolution focuses on the speciation of living things. "Complexity" as you are using the term is a vague, nonscientific concept. Yes, life becomes more "complex." But it couldn't do so without the negative entropy left over from the Big Bang.
As the other poster pointed out, there is a difference between questioning someone, and trying to discredit them. For example, you talk about this as "challenging belief" in evolution. I know that this is the standard language that is used by ID advocates, and you are not trying to be insulting with it, and I am not personally insulted (although I'm not a biologist), but I think a lot of people would find it pretty insulting.
Suppose you are driving a visiting relative around who doesn't know your home town very well. What if he tries to tell you how to drive to the grocery store, but you know those directions are wrong. Is he "challenging your beliefs" on how to buy groceries? Or would you get a little insulted that this person acted like you didn't know your way around your own town? (Your answer may partially depend on your gender:-)). Contrast this with the relative asking you "I thought we were supposed to turn left...".
The Discovery Institute, which is the brains behind this push for ID, doesn't want to debate evolution. It wants to turn the tide on what it considers an unacceptable trend towards scientific naturalism/reductionism. Its objections to evolution make no sense to anyone who has actually studied evolution in detail. This is why you don't hear of any evolutionary biologists objecting to evolution. As I said, most of the "Dr"s associated with the Discovery Institute are physicians.
I don't know a whole lot about Islam (I wish I knew more, actually.) I do know that science is not knowledge, or abstraction and documentation of information- it is a way of thinking. It is, among other things, a decision to study what you can hold in your hands and see with your own eyes (sometimes through machines), and most especially to hold no one person's opinion above another's. This sort of attitude can easily threaten secular and religious power, and historically, Islam is both. Islam flirted with Greek philosophy, but rejected it in favor of orthodoxy- you who are quoting the Quran probably know this better than I do. The West, on the other hand, embraced it.
>>I'm surprised that many seem to think this applies to just religion....
Often biologists (and scientists in general) overreact to challenges to evolution. As a rule, this is not because they are threatened to think about a world where evolution is not true. In fact, scientists live to prove existing scientific theories wrong. No, it's that they feel insulted. If you devote your life to studying something, and then a student acts as if he knows more than you do, this can be insulting, especially when it is part of a larger movement, led mostly by ministers, M.D.s, and a geneticist, to try and tell all the people who actually study this stuff as their livelihood that they are wrong on their own terms, and presumably incompetent. It's pretty insulting.
By the way, much of Christianity, eg Presbyterians and other Calvinists, hold that it is not choice to believe in God. Also, orthodox Christianity holds that both faith and reason must agree, and support belief in God. So many Christians would disagree with your last paragraph.
In the Bible, Jesus clearly says that divorce is wrong, yet Paul grants a divorce. Tempered doesn't mean diluted. Sometimes I wonder if it is only in the 20th century that we expect lessons taught by Biblical stories to be as universal as in a universal scientific law. Being a Christian doesn't mean you consider yourself a Biblical literalist.
I'm willing to bet you haven't worshipped any world leaders lately. God as apart from Man (Jesus is a special case) is a distinguishing feature of all Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Interplay of faith and reason, of hebrew and hellenistic traditions, is also a feature of Christianity. I would claim that science incorporates an analogous faith in the rationality of the physical world, as well as the reason needed to investigate that rationality (not to gloss over the many important differences between science and religion), and also in the Western separation of Church and State.
If we have more premarital sex than we used to (and I'm not convinced we do) that doesn't make us any less Christian than the halting of ritualistic sacrifices made the Jews less Jewish a millennium ago. In any case, hypocrisy doesn't make an atheist.
I can't speak to Islam, but I completely disagree that Christianity has not changed in the last 500-1000 years. Even the Bible itself has changed in a sense- it used to be written only in Latin. The Reformation changed Christianity completely. The Christianity before the Reformation stressed blind obedience in everyone but the most educated clergy. The Christianity since the reformation stresses individual reason and authority (at least relative to before the Reformation.) Individuals read and interpret the Bible, understand the worship service, form their own denominations, etc. I disagree, though, that this means that Christianity has become diluted. Certainly the authority of the Pope has been diluted. Most US Christians don't worry about losing their souls by using birth control, but I bet a lot more would worry about losing their souls by committing murder. You don't have to believe in the latin Pope to be Christian (the Greek half of the Church never did...)
Slashdot Mirror
I think that 500 years ago, the Catholic Church was worried about its slipping political control. You could be killed/tortured for challenging that control. If the Catholic Church didn't recognize that the Earth wasn't really 6000 years old, this was because there was no evidence otherwise. This doesn't mean that it didn't read large parts of the Bible as allegory.
For example, I remember reading Augustine referring to the "stories" of the old testament in 300 ad. He says he initially thought them to be simple childrens stories, unable to compare to the other ancient classics, but that with more readings, his appreciation of them grew.
I don't know a whole lot about Biblical history, but I sometimes wonder if ancient and medieval readers of the Bible would be unable to even appreciate what we mean by "reading the Bible literally", which seems to me to be a statement very influenced by enlightment thinking (even if it is enlightment thinking gone wrong.)
I think the core to western religion is hope, and personal transformation. Historically most lettered people have read the Bible as allegory, including those of ancient times. The assertion made with Jesus' alleged miracles is that he is a figure of hope and healing. It does not try to provide an experimental justification of the existence of God.
>> From a scientific standpoint it doesn't matter. All the "laws" we have now are essentially just best guesses made on available data.
I disagree with this. I have never liked the description of the transition from classical to modern mechanics as finding Newton to be a special case. If this were true then it seems to me that quantum mechanics would not be so similar to classical mechanics, although I'm not sure exactly what I mean by that. We should not be able to understand it in quasi-classical terms, I guess. It should be utterly alien, like trying to use Hooke's law to describe a physical spring that has stretched too far.
I agree with you, but I think that what you describe applies only to what might be called scientific discovery, which is often a rather messy, creative endeavor, as opposed to what might be called scientific verification, where better understood theories are refined and retested. (Of course, the two aspects overlap.) Unless you study science pretty extensively you don't usually get exposed as much to the creative side of science, which I think is a shame.
The space age is great. It lets us all see that we live on the same small world. One that could, in princple, be accidently blown up by a careless, nearby black hole.
I thought teleology was a metaphysical subject about which natural selection had to be agnostic. In any case, I know that most of the time my actions don't produce the result I had in mind for them!
Actually, the Greek's had pretty good evidence for an Earth-centered universe. They knew that stars appear fixed relative to each other. They also had a decent estimate of the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Then they knew that for the Earth to be in motion around the sun that the distance from the Earth to the stars would have to be absolutely enormous. To them such a large universe seemed absurd.
The epicycles didn't bother them so much. They were still composed of circles, which were considered a "good" shape. In any case, Ptolemy's observational astronomy was only superficially similar to a modern scientific theory. The great thinkers back then would have believed it in the same sense that we currently believe in a scientific theory. (Sort of like Genesis.)
I agree he could have been more diplomatic. Still, it is pretty crappy to let a student (an undergrad if I recall) publish a now embarrassing proof with an error that is apparently pretty obvious to an expert. That is sort of how I read this comment.
My understanding is that Einstein was actually offered the presidency of Israel. http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishleaders/a/aeinstein.htm
Sorry, I was replying to what I read as the GP post claim. To claim that all 21st century atheists believe that they are perfectly rational would surely be a gross oversimplification of a position that I am sure is as rich and varied as the many people who subscribe to it. However, I get similarly annoyed when people simplify the !(21st century atheist) position, which includes everyone from Jerry Falwell to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to Soren Kierkegaard and Paul Tillich to Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein. With one exception (I'll let you guess which...) these are not stupid people, and I think it is sort of an insult to them to sum up their position as "fairies and magic teapots and the flying spaghetti monster." Terry Eagleton does a better job of criticizing this sort of behavior than I can. (And no, I don't get about 1/4 of the allusions he makes in that review :-)).
I didn't assert the "existence" of original sin; like you, I'm not even sure what that means. I think original sin is useful as a metaphor for trying to understand history. If you are going to be so literal, then we probably can't have a very fruitful discussion; you should probably go talk to the Biblical fundamentalists :-). Certainly we can't test the metaphor original sin like, eg, the atmoic theory of matter. I am a physicist, and am well aware of what is scientifically testable and what is not. If you want to dismiss all discussions that don't fall in the former category as vague nonsense, then that is your choice. As for me, I happen to think Art and Science are equally worthwhile (even though I can only do one of them.)
Except that real science doesn't work that way. It isn't an empirical analogue to a mathematical proof. In practice, any scientific theory (or individual experiment) involves many different assumptions that cannot be easily tested individually. Instead the entire conceptual framework is assumed and then is tested for self-consistency, and for consistency with experiment. This has many similarities to the historical, "orthodox" meaning of faith. To think correctly, one had to assume the existence of God. However, after making that assumption, rational faculties would allow the believer to confirm the consistency of this belief. While their methods of confirmation did and do differ from those used in science in very large, important ways, I do not see the same perfect dichotomy that you do. I think you are oversimplifying.
That's an outright lie....
Have you ever actually done any scientific research? If we are going to characterize "faith" as irrational stubbornness, then faith is needed in spades to get anything accomplished in science. If nothing else, science requires faith that the universe will turn out to be intelligible.
That's a strawman argument....
Um, OK. That's not what your original post said , though. You said "all knowledge is derived from evidence and logic EXCEPT knowledge pertaining to topics they have been indoctrinated from birth to accept due to faith". In any case, historically empiricism different from rationalism in that it did not ground knowledge in pure reason. So to my knowledge of philosophy (and I am not a philosopher) you are still wrong.
Einstein is quoted as saying he believed in Spinoza's God. Spinoza was a pantheist. While Einstein did not believe in a personal God, he can be considered an atheist only from a Dawkins-manichean-esque perspective where everyone has to be either a Bible-thumping fundamentalist, or someone who makes fun of those Bible-thumping fundamentalists.
Only 19th+ century fundamentalists are unimaginative enough to read Genesis as a set of supernatural claims. (Maybe in another thousand years groups will consider Romeo and Juliet a parable warning parents to let their kids date who they want to.) Creationists take the differences between science and religion and push them under the rug; I claim you are caricaturizing them. Science is only retrospectively based on evidence and consensus. Scientific discovery requires as much faith as any religion. And religion does not ignore evidence. The progression from sacrificing first born children at the altar of Baal to secular government and nonviolent resistence has not been a random walk.
As for cognitive dissonance: I consider myself a "moderately" religious person. I do not blindly believe in Genesis. However, when I see how violence propogates itself through generations in the middle east and elsewhere, I cannot believe that idea of original sin does not resonate with some Truth. Certainly Adam and Eve were not real, but a quantum mechanical wavefunction may not be real either.
My life is filled with actions and belief not based on evidence or logic though. For example, I could probably fill pages with the strange rituals I use to beg microsoft software products to not crash. No, I think cognitive dissonance is believing that throughout history all human behavior has been dominated by irrational beliefs, except for 21st century atheists.
Just my 2 cents.
Entropy is defined in terms of counted states- it is to be proportional to the number of microstates compatible with a given system's macrostate. k*Log[N].Maybe someone somewhere has a definition of complexity that is meaningful for, eg, atoms in a lattice, or a computer program. That's very different from an amoeba or a person. If you can't measure it (at least in principle) then it isn't science.
How do you measure a quantity for complexity? Physics defines entropy, which is sort of related to what people mean by complexity. I wouldn't guess, though, that most practicing biologists even know the mathematical definition for entropy. Darwin certainly didn't know the modern definition since it had not been invented/discovered yet. When you want to philosophize about science, which I think is a worthy endeavor, then yes, I would think you want to talk about complexity. If you are doing a modern, natural scientific experiment, though, you need to work with quantities that can be measured, directly or indirectly, in well defined ways.
A laboratory has never produced revolved a planet around a star. We don't doubt that it is happening. Evolution is like that. It is a fact of the fossil record.
Certain details about the mechanism of evolution are not all completely understood. For example, evolution seems to speed up as the complexity of the organism increases. The 40000+ generations of your E-coli are nothing on a geological time scale.
To understand all the apparent difficulties with any scientific theory is difficult. If many people are not convinced of evolution: fine. My guess is that if, eg, quantum mechanics were more accessible, they wouldn't be convinced of it either. This doesn't mean the professionals are wrong.
I think the analysis of Russia is completely wrong. The Czar was close to God. The Caesar WAS a God. And the divinity of Caesar was nothing compared to that of Pharoah or the Chinese Emporer. And in any case, divine right to rule is Germanic in origin. It does not come from Christianity. Before Christianity were the Greek Gods. We may have now so refined the idea of God that He no longer exists, but He is no longer a human being, either. Christianity is part of that process.
Life doesn't "not intend" to evolve any more than balls do not intend to roll down a hill. Scientifically this is a nonsensical question, like wondering whether cold is red or blue. Belief in a mechanistic world motivated development of the scientific method. Belief that the Sun is a fitting home for God motivated Kepler to develop his laws of planetary motion. Neither of these beliefs are scientific.
Also, evolution focuses on the speciation of living things. "Complexity" as you are using the term is a vague, nonscientific concept. Yes, life becomes more "complex." But it couldn't do so without the negative entropy left over from the Big Bang.
As the other poster pointed out, there is a difference between questioning someone, and trying to discredit them. For example, you talk about this as "challenging belief" in evolution. I know that this is the standard language that is used by ID advocates, and you are not trying to be insulting with it, and I am not personally insulted (although I'm not a biologist), but I think a lot of people would find it pretty insulting.
:-)). Contrast this with the relative asking you "I thought we were supposed to turn left...".
Suppose you are driving a visiting relative around who doesn't know your home town very well. What if he tries to tell you how to drive to the grocery store, but you know those directions are wrong. Is he "challenging your beliefs" on how to buy groceries? Or would you get a little insulted that this person acted like you didn't know your way around your own town? (Your answer may partially depend on your gender
The Discovery Institute, which is the brains behind this push for ID, doesn't want to debate evolution. It wants to turn the tide on what it considers an unacceptable trend towards scientific naturalism/reductionism. Its objections to evolution make no sense to anyone who has actually studied evolution in detail. This is why you don't hear of any evolutionary biologists objecting to evolution. As I said, most of the "Dr"s associated with the Discovery Institute are physicians.
I don't know a whole lot about Islam (I wish I knew more, actually.) I do know that science is not knowledge, or abstraction and documentation of information- it is a way of thinking. It is, among other things, a decision to study what you can hold in your hands and see with your own eyes (sometimes through machines), and most especially to hold no one person's opinion above another's. This sort of attitude can easily threaten secular and religious power, and historically, Islam is both. Islam flirted with Greek philosophy, but rejected it in favor of orthodoxy- you who are quoting the Quran probably know this better than I do. The West, on the other hand, embraced it.
>>I'm surprised that many seem to think this applies to just religion. ...
Often biologists (and scientists in general) overreact to challenges to evolution. As a rule, this is not because they are threatened to think about a world where evolution is not true. In fact, scientists live to prove existing scientific theories wrong. No, it's that they feel insulted. If you devote your life to studying something, and then a student acts as if he knows more than you do, this can be insulting, especially when it is part of a larger movement, led mostly by ministers, M.D.s, and a geneticist, to try and tell all the people who actually study this stuff as their livelihood that they are wrong on their own terms, and presumably incompetent. It's pretty insulting.
By the way, much of Christianity, eg Presbyterians and other Calvinists, hold that it is not choice to believe in God. Also, orthodox Christianity holds that both faith and reason must agree, and support belief in God. So many Christians would disagree with your last paragraph.
In the Bible, Jesus clearly says that divorce is wrong, yet Paul grants a divorce. Tempered doesn't mean diluted. Sometimes I wonder if it is only in the 20th century that we expect lessons taught by Biblical stories to be as universal as in a universal scientific law. Being a Christian doesn't mean you consider yourself a Biblical literalist.
I'm willing to bet you haven't worshipped any world leaders lately. God as apart from Man (Jesus is a special case) is a distinguishing feature of all Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Interplay of faith and reason, of hebrew and hellenistic traditions, is also a feature of Christianity. I would claim that science incorporates an analogous faith in the rationality of the physical world, as well as the reason needed to investigate that rationality (not to gloss over the many important differences between science and religion), and also in the Western separation of Church and State.
If we have more premarital sex than we used to (and I'm not convinced we do) that doesn't make us any less Christian than the halting of ritualistic sacrifices made the Jews less Jewish a millennium ago. In any case, hypocrisy doesn't make an atheist.
I can't speak to Islam, but I completely disagree that Christianity has not changed in the last 500-1000 years. Even the Bible itself has changed in a sense- it used to be written only in Latin. The Reformation changed Christianity completely. The Christianity before the Reformation stressed blind obedience in everyone but the most educated clergy. The Christianity since the reformation stresses individual reason and authority (at least relative to before the Reformation.) Individuals read and interpret the Bible, understand the worship service, form their own denominations, etc. I disagree, though, that this means that Christianity has become diluted. Certainly the authority of the Pope has been diluted. Most US Christians don't worry about losing their souls by using birth control, but I bet a lot more would worry about losing their souls by committing murder. You don't have to believe in the latin Pope to be Christian (the Greek half of the Church never did...)