Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you are saying, kiwi, and I apologize if I am, but...

Atheists aren't all that great, nor special (not saying there IS any such group, of course). That's all I wanted to say.

I didn't say atheists were 'great', they're human and subject to all the human frailties. However, a large subset of them are scientific and open-minded, which can't be said for any religious groups.

Okay, now that, I take insult to. Any religious group? Any? I find you are painting with a very, very wide brush, sir.

Again, I quote Jerry Coyne:

"'In the end, then, there is a fundamental distinction between scientific truths and religious truths, however you construe them. The difference rests on how you answer one question: how would I know if I were wrong? Darwin's colleague Thomas Huxley remarked that "science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact." As with any scientific theory, there are potentially many ugly facts that could kill Darwinism. Two of these would be the presence of human fossils and dinosaur fossils side by side, and the existence of adaptations in one species that benefit only a different species. Since no such facts have ever appeared, we continue to accept evolution as true. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, are immune to ugly facts. Indeed, they are maintained in the face of ugly facts, such as the impotence of prayer. There is no way to adjudicate between conflicting religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations."

And I invite you to name a single religious group that is fundamentally skeptical (ie. open-minded) about its faith claims.

I see. I misunderstood what you meant by "open-minded." I thought you were saying religious groups were prejudice. The connotation from hearing "close-minded" as a term for being prejudice, perhaps. Well whatever, my mistake, I do apologize.

However, all the same, that does not change the fact that there ARE religious groups (or religious people) where science coexists with faith.

And there are religious groups where murder (to take an extreme example) coexists with faith. That doesn't make murder and faith-based ethics are compatible.

The fact that people can cling to two contradictory positions and warp one to fit the other doesn't imply at all that faith and science 'work together'. (At not in any but the most trivial of senses).

1st... one of the 10 commandments for Christianity is "Thou shalt not kill" Eh not sure on my spelling.
Catholics and Mormons are different from Christians. Catholics beliefs differ more from Christianity. In a sense you have to earn your way to heaven with good deeds. Mormons are even more different and are very different. My teachers, I also see this in text books, call Catholics (such as the Vatican) Christians. Though, the two religions are not the same. I am christian, and proud of it. I respect other peoples beliefs and don't knock them down for it. I have a good many of Athiest friends that are very nice people. I have gothic friends even. They are very nice and, no, do not wear all black. Science is right up to a point. When they say the universe was made by particles colliding together... That's more an explanation for gods act of creating it in the first place. Just like god made those tiny atoms and made all those elements, knew everything about them, about us, before they were created. Saying man evolved from a monkey... now that's just insane. God created humans, as humans! God created Adam from dust. Then Eve from one of Adam's ribs.
*note* these are my beliefs and no one has to agree.

Exactly.

Murder isn't compatible with Christianity (nor, for that matter, with Secular Humanism). And yet despite this incompability we see plenty of Christian murderers.

And some of the core tenets of science are that theories of knowledge are built out of repeated experimentation yielding consistent results, and careful observation of phenomena with plenty of safeguards to eliminate individual and cultural bias.

Science isn't compatible with religion. And yet, despite this incompability, we see plenty of scientists making special exceptions to their scientific enquiry for religion.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us that people can be inconsistent in their thinking and actions.

Incorrect! Catholicism, Mormonism, Protestantism, Calvinism, etc. are all sects of Christianity.



Even science dosen't say Man evolved from monkeys. It states we share a common ancestor, as branches of a tree share the same trunk.

Oh, wait. wonderseuak, I actually missed the 'monkey to man fallacy' there. Good thing kattenijin is onto it!

It's pretty arbitrary to talk about our common ancestor with other apes, too. I mean, go back far enough and we share a common ancestor with pine trees and bananas.

Why do Christians always have to say how proud they are about it? I thought pride was a sin...

(This puts me in mind of the time I asked a Christian this question and she responded with, "Pride doesn't have anything to do with being proud!" )

WHY???
Because you, and people like you, which don't have meaning in their existence and don't believe in life after death, think that all other (which are different than you) are stupid.

And I believe you are incorrect. They are not exclusive, nor need to be warped to fit each other; they can easily go hand-in-hand. The problem is not religion in itself, but closer to fundamentalism. A certain aspect of religion. One that is not shared universally.


Yeah? And YOU do have meaning? Dude, pull your head out of your ass. What makes you so special? What puts you above the rest of us?

Moderator note: don't be a dick.

Be nice, guys. Be courteous, kind, and not insulting to your other debaters, and please don't try to put words in their mouth. You can make pretty much whatever point you like, but you have to be nice about it. If you're grumpy or feel like you can't be nice, step away from the keyboard and don't post.

Thanks a lot!!!! Now I can't post. Harumph.

I tend to agree that, in general, religious people are less logical and reasonable than atheists. To me, they have already made a huge leap to illogicality by accepting a premise based on faith, not evidence.

This semester, I had an online student (so I never met her in person to judge her demeanor) who constantly brought religion, especially Jesus, into her posts and assignments--I very diplomatically pointed out that we were studying history, not theology.

Well then, she plagiarized her paper--I found about half of it was from assorted websites. She claimed she had no reason to lie because she was in training to be a minister, but that "the devil can use anybody." A later email suggested that a demon had possessed her and forced her to plagiarize.

This is a perfect example of what I dislike about Christianity--what if the demon decided she should take out the difficult history professor? It is just a way of abdicating responsibility for oneself. "Putting it in God's hands" or being possessed by demons are just cop outs. No logical basis for it--just a way to excuse your actions.

@ kiwi_tea:

No, the statistics did not distract me. You were the one who brought them up, so obviously you thought they were important in the effort to support your hypothesis that science is fundamentally irreconcilable with religion/faith and that one must put aside reason in order to have faith or vice versa. I merely pointed out why such statistics should be thought about critically and why they might not "prove" what you think they "prove."



Most mythologies will make a claim to "know" how the universe began and how it is structured and such, as explaining how things came to be is largely what mythology does. When it comes to the Bible, I recognize the Genesis creation account as a myth, with the understanding that myth =/= false in a dismissive or belittling sort of way. This does not, for me, trivialize it, however. For me personally, the importance of Genesis lies not in that I think "this is how it all happened" in a lame attempt to turn Genesis into a science text, but rather in the fact that it is a reminder to me that God has always been with us, from the very beginning, whatever the beginning of the (current iteration of?) the universe was.

Also, individuals make claims to know how the universe started, not a "religion." A religion has a general set of tenets, but it is individuals who follow the religion who make specific claims, erroneous or otherwise, based on those tenets. And sometimes different individuals following the same religion will make conflicting claims. I don't think that the words of Scripture are a "claim," but people do make claims and inferences based on it. To say that a "religion" makes a claim is erroneous, though.

Now, maybe that's pedantic or splitting hairs and/or maybe I'm completely misinterpreting what you're trying to say, and if I am I apologize. But it seems to me that you're saying that if you're Christian, then you're somehow obligated to believe that the Genesis account is literal history and/or that any Christian's "claim to answer the question of how the universe began" will be some form of "Goddidit." Neither of these is necessarily true. So you're coming across, at least to me, as shoving all Christians into one box and then telling us what we all believe based on what some Christians believe. Do you think this to be sound reasoning? Because it looks suspiciously like a compositional fallacy to me... But again, my apologies if I'm completely misunderstanding you.

Speaking of glossing over, though, I did notice that you glossed over my claim that the root of the "conflict" between science and religion is that some Christians idolize the Bible when they shouldn't, so when they feel it is threatened, they lash out. It's compounded by the tendency of some people to believe what they're told without thinking about it. i.e. someone tells a Christian that science and religion conflict, and they believe it and will spit the same back if someone asks them. To me, the "conflict" is as simple as that.



Ah but lack of evidence isn't evidence of lack. And a person of faith might look at that same body of science and see the proverbial fingerprints of God all over it. Same body, different ways of looking at it.

I guess when all is said and done I just fail to understand how the possibility of there being a "divine determination" in the universe at all conflicts with the process of learning about the universe via scientific investigation. And because I fail to see that, I fail to see where there is this huge conflict between science and religion in general. (As I said, some specific beliefs of a specific subset of people do conflict with science as we know it, but you can't logically apply that to the whole of theistic belief.)

For me personally, science is science. It is merely a method of understanding our world and our universe. Faith is faith, "merely" the thing that gives my understanding of the world/universe and how it works meaning. For me, personally, science alone is...empty. It's a dry, soulless accumulation of facts and theories and proofs that only, for me personally, gains meaning, interest, and importance in the light of possibly understanding God a little better through it. But hey, maybe that's just me and my outlook. Certainly wouldn't be the first time.

See, that's something I never really understood. It seems both sides, atheists and religious, and this is not exclusive to everyone, of course, seem to think it's a black-and-white issue.

You are either for science, or you are for religion. You must be one, or the other. But that's a false sense of decision. Like, you can believe completely in science, but still believe in God. You could say, and I'm assuming this is what you mean, iCad, that science is how God made the world work; science is the clockworks, and he is the clock maker.

I think "either religion or science" is a false dichtomy, yes. I have my cake and eat it, too, thank you . It's just like those who think it's either creation or evolution; that's a false dichotomy, too.

And that's more or less exactly what I was saying. Thank you for putting it into fewer words.

Yup, no problem.

But again we're sweeping back to the fundamental emptiness of the religious stance:

Lack of evidence in vampires isn't evidence of lack?

Lack of evidence in unicorns isn't evidence of lack?

Lack of evidence in Zeus and Aphrodite isn't evidence of lack?

Lack of evidence in Yahweh isn't evidence of lack?

Lack of evidence in reincarnation isn't evidence of lack?

Lack of evidence in tables secretly being shape-shifting purple gorillas isn't evidence of lack?

YES! These lacks of evidences are all evidence of lack. The theist just makes a special exception to how they would normally process information about the world, and they refuse to process it in specific situations so as to sustain their faith.


So Occam's Razor it like a good scienticist doing their job properly. "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.", as Laplace said to Napoleon, "I have no need of that hypothesis." It's true even for theists who are scientists, if they see the fingerprints of God all over their work then they're not doing their job! No more than if they saw the claw prints of ineffable celestial crocodile-like spirits in every piece of research, or any other bias totally irrelevant to their field of study. A good scientist, when he or she hears hoofbeats in the night, thinks first of horses, not zebras (unless they life in remote Africa :P), and certainly not unicorns. Otherwise they end up concluding 'unicorns' just because they want to.

Ahh... now I see who I'm debating with. An arrogant, ignorant, hypocritical troll who obviously can't read. Thanks for clearing that up.

I'd ask to you seriously answer the question, but you've made it clear that you're only here to stir shit. Interesting. I get the same attitude whenever I ask why it's okay for Christians to be so proud, despite the fact that excess pride is supposed to be a sin. Huh...

Actually, I would say that all of the above are true, from a strict logical standpoint. It doesn't mean that I, personally, think that vampires, etc. exist. It just means that, logically, a lack of evidence of them doesn't mean that they don't exist.

For me, personally, in the end, I'm not hung up on evidence. I'm hung up on what makes sense, even if it only makes sense to me. We're all kind of subjective that way. Perhaps without evidence, most people feel no reason to believe that something exists. It's been made quite clear to me that, when it comes to a lot of things, I'm not "most people."

But hey, for a long, long time, it was thought that the coelocanth (or however that's spelled) didn't exist anymore. There was no evidence that it still existed at all, anywhere. ...Until, of course, one was caught. Golly, it existed all that time and there was absolutely NO evidence of its existence!

Yes, but that's a case for science again, with its tentative beliefs built on observation, and the example re-raises one of Coyne's points:



Prior to that he had noted:



I know, though, that you'll say Yahweh is more subtle. But that seems to be more special pleading, and all for your sake, nothing and nobody else's.

(Edit: In review, I can see how this line above might be read as an attempt to be hurtful. I really need to stress that it's not. It's simply that by making this special exception to learning so as to sustain belief, you justify the broader faith (ie, the broader anti-science) movement, you re-set the precident for blind faith, and for apparently selfish reasons. I suppose even then, that might sound like an attempt to hurt, but I want to stress, it's an observation, not a judgement of your character (ie. I'm not trying to say that you are, by character, a 'selfish' person). To be clear, I like you a lot, from our interactions so far). (EDIT Edit: Oh-god-I'm-sounding-like-a-Woody-Allen-character... Whether I like you or not is probably still beside the point. What I should have said is: You're clearly someone of integrity).



Edit: Also, because you may not have seen this edit, I'm moving it down here


A literalist stance on the Bible certainly makes matters worse, but it's not causative. The root still lies in extraordinary claims made without evidence, and seemingly built out of received bias and personal invention. I've said 'personal invention' enough times now that it should be clear I don't think Christians are obliged to believe anything, but if they are not taking a literalist stance then they do seem to believe their own rationalisations. Again, I'd argue the literalist stance is at least consistent, even if it's incoherent. The cause is, again, everything I quoted in Coyne, and much of what I've already said: Belief in purple shape-shifting gorillas that we cannot see but are always with us in an outer dimension is unscientific, and lashes out at whole areas of scientific inquiry, purporting to have definite answers to them. Similar belief in a transcendent god is no different, except for the sophistry encapsulated in the word 'transcendent'. Make the gorillas transcendent too, and we've got a deal-breaker.

The difference here however, is that there was already evidence that it at least used to exist. We just thought they were extinct because we did not have any evidence of them being alive anymore. However there has never been any actual evidence of the existance of any particular god.

There's one quote from Richard Dawkins (well maybe he took it from someone else but I've only heard it from him), and it goes something like this: "We are all atheists, it is just that those of us who identify as such go one god further."

Also that was the reason I had 'evidence' in italics up there. It doesn't mean that they don't exist, no. It just incredibly strongly suggests that they don't. The same way that lack of living triceratops suggests that they are extinct. The same way that lack of living coelacanths strongly suggested they were extinct. We can be wrong. Evidence can mislead, that's exactly why we have science at all.

What are you suggesting with that example? That scientists should believe extinct species are still out there without any evidence? Of course that's not what you're suggesting (I hope). As I said above, this seems an example to counter your claims, not one to support them.