Without seeming to pry (and if you choose not to answer, I'll surely understand, since this is a somewhat personal matter, though it remains closely connected to the topic at hand), might I ask what precipitated this rejection of religion, and whether it was by introspection or comparative study (e.g. "science versus religion") that you eventually rejected belief in a deity altogether?Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman
Not prying at all, and thanks for your interest and the question; I don't mind talking about it. However, I must stress that my apostasy was a very long, convoluted process, and certainly not something that was instantaneous or overnight. In fact, I don't think I point to a singular moment where I consciously went from a highly religious Christian to an "agnostic" to an "atheist." All that said, it began with my health problems that started in my early teens. That lead to my initial doubt. At the time, though, I was till very much "Christian," but was merely having a crisis of faith. This lead me in a lot of directions, to online religious/atheist debates, to articles, to philosophy, even to YouTube videos. I really inundated myself with the subject from both sides.
At the same time, though, I was really developing an interest in logic and rationality, because not only was I having a crisis of faith, I was having an... I guess you could call it "epistemological crisis" of wanting to know HOW we could know anything. So as I developed my understanding of logic/rationality, I began to simply find that the arguments against religion were, in general, stronger and harder to poke holes in than the arguments for religion. As I alluded to earlier, there wasn't ONE argument or point that sealed it for me, but it was merely an accumulative effect. EG, one question I never could find a satisfactory answer to was: "If I was never been TOLD to believe this, would I have ever believed it on my own?" To me, the obvious answer to that was NO.
What's more, I never found a satisfactory response to the Problem of Evil, particularly as it came to theodicy (and I read a great deal on this). It may also have had a lot to my burgeoning interest in the arts, where I found filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman that seemed to express in so many of his films my own crisis; or William Blake, who seem to have came up with a psychological explanation of religion and mythology that, to me, made more sense than any religion being "right." There was also Carl Jung and his ideas of the collective unconscious and universal symbols that developed into religions. There was also my interest in cognitive science, especially in biases, where I equally found probable causes for man developing religions that were external expressions of their mind (the "mind-projection fallacy" as ET Jaynes termed it).
Perhaps what sealed it was my extensive reading of the website Lesswrong, which seemed to clarify so many things in my mind and lead me to a place where I could no longer even consider any religion plausible, much less probable; especially when it came to devastating articles like this, for which, no matter how many times I've posted it, I've never heard a substantial rebuttal from theists. The process, all told, stretched from when I was about 13 to the time I was about 21. I think I was 21 when I first consciously thought of myself as "atheist." I probably started thinking of myself as "agnostic" when I was about 16, so that's an indication of how long and involved it was.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
First, thanks for your well-considered reply. Without delving into the "complexity of the Universe" remark in the above article, as it regards the Old Testament, this quote:
"Maybe someday, humanity will advance further, and anyone who endorses the Bible as a source of ethics will be treated the same way as Trent Lott endorsing Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign..."
struck me as odd, since the author failed to stress "all ethics..." (and one must presume that this was the intent). (Any) ethical (not philosophically moralist, but ethical) platform is simply too easy to cite; Genesis 1:27 and the subsequent 1:26 spring immediately to mind - God fashioning Mankind "after his ideal" after appointing them "stewards" of the earth and its inhabitants (although the unfortunate choices in the translation of the Vulgata of Saint Jerome from the Hebrew to Latin, forward to the 1611 debacle of King Jimmy which insists that Man is awarded "dominion over" the world) surely stands as an example of Ethics per se, nonpareil.
Sadly, we have proven mighty poor stewards, it would seem.
Yes, collectively, we have "proven mighty poor stewards" of our earth,
but on judgement day, God will look at us each individually.
"I have come to terms with the future:
From this day onward I will walk
easy on the earth. Plant trees.
Kill no living things.
Live in harmony with all creatures.
I will restore the earth where I am.
Use no more of its resources than I need.
And listen, listen to what it is telling me.
— M.J. Slim Hooey
Live in the sunshine. Swim in the sea. Drink the wild air ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
I like this as a secular philosophy - until a wasp begins annoying me in the garden.
For the billions of Catholics, however, it's the second member of the Trinity who'll be the Judge - even for us wacky cultural anti-Papist Catholics - and remembering what he did to that fig tree in Matthew 21:20, I figger my goose is cooked.
You are creating a false dichotomy that assumes that belief in atheism is rational and belief in theism is irrational. Unfortunately for your argument, the reasons people become atheists or theists is rarely the result of prolonged thought and logic. If you study the literature on the subject, you'll see that the strongest factor in the conversion to either is usually what the person's family believes, specifically the spouse. The next biggest indicator is how well the religion caters to their lifestyle and other beliefs, ie the utility. It's almost never a rational decision based on rational logic about the truth or falseness of claims. In fact, I believe that it's largely temperamental whether one is an atheist or a theist. Rationality is what we use after the fact to justify our decisions to ourselves not the mechanism by which we choose to believe or disbelieve.
You do know that Ray Kurzweil's singularity theory is just a knock off of the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Omega Point theory don't you? Except instead of God it's AI.
Your studies don't indicate that more atheistic societies are less violent than religious ones. They indicate that Western societies are currently less violent than Eastern societies. Correlation does not imply causation. The people who conducted those studies chose to look for atheism, but they might just as well have looked for which society has the more blue jeans. Increased levels of atheism is incidental to the success of Western society and not it's cause. The real factors appear to be largely economic. Besides, your 2 percent of society isn't wagging the dog. To put it mildly, your conclusions are irrational and self-serving.
As for adulthood and mental health, I linked an article above on how religion leads to better mental well being. I'll quote another study here about how it lowers depression levels and prevents suicide.
METHOD: Depressed inpatients (N=371) who reported belonging to one specific religion or described themselves as having no religious affiliation were compared in terms of their demographic and clinical characteristics. RESULTS: Religiously unaffiliated subjects had significantly more lifetime suicide attempts and more first-degree relatives who committed suicide than subjects who endorsed a religious affiliation. Unaffiliated subjects were younger, less often married, less often had children, and had less contact with family members. Furthermore, subjects with no religious affiliation perceived fewer reasons for living, particularly fewer moral objections to suicide. In terms of clinical characteristics, religiously unaffiliated subjects had more lifetime impulsivity, aggression, and past substance use disorder. No differences in the level of subjective and objective depression, hopelessness, or stressful life events were found. CONCLUSIONS: Religious affiliation is associated with less suicidal behavior in depressed inpatients. After other factors were controlled, it was found that greater moral objections to suicide and lower aggression level in religiously affiliated subjects may function as protective factors against suicide attempts. Further study about the influence of religious affiliation on aggressive behavior and how moral objections can reduce the probability of acting on suicidal thoughts may offer new therapeutic strategies in suicide prevention.
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/arti...ticleid=177228
Look up the conflict thesis of religion and science and you will see that it is based on nineteenth century propaganda by atheists twisting facts and lying to discredit religion. The people who believed in the conflict thesis have been disproved and discredited by modern historians of science. Your theory is out of date by a century, constantly disproved by experts, and yet you cling to it rather than accept the facts. Reminds me of the creationists.
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
Apparently there are several types of atheist and several types of non-religious, and it's a bit of a spectrum the same as conventional religion.
The non-religious and agnostics can be sub-divided into separate categories of their own but you get the idea. It's not all one thing.1) Intellectual atheist/agnostic
This type of nonbeliever seeks information and intellectual stimulation about atheism.
They like debating and arguing, particularly on popular Internet sites.
(Ahem.)
They're also well-versed in books and articles about religion and atheism, and prone to citing those works frequently.
2) Activist
These kinds of atheists and agnostics are not content with just disbelieving in God; they want to tell others why they reject religion and why society would be better off if we all did likewise.
They tend to be vocal about political causes like gay rights, feminism, the environment and the care of animals.
3) Seeker-agnostic
This group is made up of people who are unsure about the existence of a God but keep an open mind and recognize the limits of human knowledge and experience.
Silver and Coleman describe this group as people who regularly question their own beliefs and “do not hold a firm ideological position.”
That doesn't mean this group is confused, the researchers say. They just embrace uncertainty.
4) Anti-theist
This group regularly speaks out against religion and religious beliefs, usually by positioning themselves as “diametrically opposed to religious ideology,” Silver and Coleman wrote.
“Anti-theists view religion as ignorance and see any individual or institution associated with it as backward and socially detrimental,” the researchers wrote. “The Anti-Theist has a clear and – in their view, superior – understanding of the limitations and danger of religions.”
Anti-theists are outspoken, devoted and – at times – confrontational about their disbelief. They believe that "obvious fallacies in religion and belief should be aggressively addressed in some form or another.”
5) Non-theist
The smallest group among the six are the non-theists, people who do not involve themselves with either religion or anti-religion.
In many cases, this comes across as apathy or disinterest.
“A Non-Theist simply does not concern him or herself with religion,” Silver and Coleman wrote. “Religion plays no role or issue in one’s consciousness or worldview; nor does a Non- Theist have concern for the atheist or agnostic movement.”
They continue: “They simply do not believe, and in the same right, their absence of faith means the absence of anything religion in any form from their mental space.”
6) Ritual atheist
They don't believe in God, they don’t associate with religion, and they tend to believe there is no afterlife, but the sixth type of nonbeliever still finds useful the teachings of some religious traditions.
“They see these as more or less philosophical teachings of how to live life and achieve happiness than a path to transcendental liberation,” Silver and Coleman wrote. “For example, these individuals may participate in specific rituals, ceremonies, musical opportunities, meditation, yoga classes, or holiday traditions.”
For many of these nonbelievers, their adherence to ritual may stem from family traditions. For others, its a personal connection to, or respect for, the "profound symbolism" inherent within religious rituals, beliefs and ceremonies, according the researchers.
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/0...s-of-atheists/
"So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
"This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
Feed the Hungry!
For accuracy's sake, "...alea iacta esto." Cćsar was not yet in Italy when he said this, but was at the Rubicon bridge, in Gaul (his own journal tells is that this was spoken at the north end of the span). Plutarch (in Βίοι Παράλληλοι) records Cćsar's quotation from Μένανδρος in the third person present imperative: "ἀνερρίφθω κύβος." The transcription error from Suetonius' De vita Cćsarum has been carried down through history, doubtless in this generation by the Great Oracle Wikipedia.
I have enjoyed reading the well-argued posts in this forum thread, and I've learned much from them. However I am dismayed by what seems to me to be an inability of members of two opposing camps, the religious and the atheist, to meet somewhere in the middle and live peaceably. Instead it seems we have what amounts to a state of ongoing war between the two camps, each one claiming to be arguing logically and "scientifically," and each seeking to prove the other somehow wrong. Both camps here claim to have "reason" and "science" on their side. This current debate between science and religion is not like the former great debates between science and religion, such as the debates between the Church and Galileo, or between Darwin and Wilberforce, or even the legal debate in the Scope's trial. Those older debates pitched religious dogmatism against scientific rationalism. What we seem to have here is a debate between folks who claim to be scientists and other folks who claim to be religious, both appealing to "reason" and "reality" to make their arguments.
For the purpose of full disclosure I must say that I am a scientist. I do understand how science views the physical and biological world. I also happen to believe in God, and I do not believe that belief in God is incompatible with being a good scientist.
"Dogmatism" is antithetical to science. True scientists, however much they believe that their science "explains" the world must always be willing to question their scientific beliefs. Religion is often presented as an unquestioning dogmatic acceptance of beliefs, and this has historically been the case. Scientific thinking is a relatively recent human enterprise, and religious/magical thinking is much, much older. It is easy for us to understand and criticize, from our modern perspective, the previous dogmatic arguments of religion against science (e.g. Galileo and Darwin). It is perhaps a little more difficult to appreciate how dogmatism can corrupt scientific thinking.
The fact is that supposed "scientists" can succumb to dogmatism. Scientists, as much as the religious, are still human beings with human minds, and they are subject to the same sort of psychological predispositions as folks who are not "scientists."
You would think that a "true" scientist would be free of such common human psychological prejudicial "baggage," and I would hope that this is so. Unfortunately many so-called scientists have not achieved such a state.
To see atheistic hate at its extreme, watch The Killing Fields about the Khmer Rouge.
You have provided dogmatic statements that you believe in. That's fine. I enjoy listening to atheists present their belief system. However, you have not provided evidence.I am NOT going to start another Many Worlds discussion with you. You have displayed ad infinitum that you don't even understand what Many Worlds is despite having four different people attempt to explain it to. You never even responded to my list of evidence in the last thread: Instead of addressing these issues, you chose to make the MW/CI issue about the nature of choice, and your Wishful Thinking that choice must exist because you want it to, and that choice can only exist in an indeterministic universe. Until you deal with the evidence above, you're the one believing in "collapse" mythologies in spite of the evidence.
I think the closest we came to agreement is that many worlds does not account for the Born probabilities. That's enough to discredit it.
I can understand that Dawkins and Hitchens want others to view them as better than missionaries for marketing purposes. Nonetheless, they are missionaries: they are looking for converts to their worldview in a religious context.
Because of the quantity of violence involved, the evidence of violence traceable to atheists is adequate for my purposes. Atheists are a small proportion of the population. According to the study, they account for three times the amount of violence as others.
Given that, I have to ask what is wrong with atheists?
What I am doing is mirroring the argument you have made against theists back onto atheists. When I do that, the evidence reflects even worse on atheists than it does on theists.
My blog: https://frankhubeny.blog/
I didn't realize it until mortalterror posted the information about the "conflict theory", but the underlying assumption of this thread is something created by Draper and White in the 19th century. That is when they aligned atheism with science and then pitted science against religion. What we are discussing is the continued influence of that association.
There is no inherent conflict between science and religion. Both are ways to seek the truth and they can easily coexist. However, there is actual conflict between atheism and theistic religion. That is the conflict between two general views of the universe each seeking to persuade others to join their side.
I'm reading John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science http://www.templeofearth.com/books/h...%20science.pdf embarrassed by how much of my own view of reality has been influenced by this thesis even though I thought I was opposed to Draper's position.
Last edited by YesNo; 10-15-2013 at 10:39 AM.
My blog: https://frankhubeny.blog/
Have we been poor stewards or were we never stewards to anything more than our relative moral systems that invoked a God to legitimize those systems in our own minds? Don't you find it quite easy for mankind to establish a God in their OWN image, ascribe their own moral systems to that God, and then use that God to justify pretty much anything they want to? I think Yudkowsky gives a superb example with the Egyptian plagues:I think the crux of the argument is situated in that paragraph. Even if we were to accept that The Bible has a few good grains of moral truths, the underlying morality espoused in much of it is so far out of step with our modern conception that it's a marvel more people don't recognize it and "don't get slapped" for suggesting that's where they get their morality. Plus, even when thinking of something so many take as definitive like The Ten Commandments there are glaring (and very humorous) problems with it.Intrinsically, there's nothing small about the ethical problem with slaughtering thousands of innocent first-born male children to convince an unelected Pharaoh to release slaves who logically could have been teleported out of the country. It should be more glaring than the comparatively trivial scientific error of saying that grasshoppers have four legs. And yet, if you say the Earth is flat, people will look at you like you're crazy. But if you say the Bible is your source of ethics, women will not slap you. Most people's concept of rationality is determined by what they think they can get away with; they think they can get away with endorsing Bible ethics; and so it only requires a manageable effort of self-deception for them to overlook the Bible's moral problems. Everyone has agreed not to notice the elephant in the living room, and this state of affairs can sustain itself for a time.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
No, not at all. As Luke Muelhausser's banner on commonsenseatheism says: "Atheism is just the beginning; now it's time to solve the harder questions." In fact, I said as much when I said "Rejecting religion does not mean eliminating that bias completely, but it is one step on the path to rejecting all mystical thinking and the cognitive biases that produce them." I do believe that any true rationalism will reject religion and all mystical thinking, but rejecting mystical thinking does not endow one with a "perfected rationalist" membership card. Most atheists I know are only marginally (if at all) more rational than most of the theists I know. However, all of the most rational people I know are atheists.
I largely agree with this, however I'd put the qualifier "most" before "people become atheists" as I do think there are some people that develop an interest in rationality that lead them one way or another. I said in my post describing my apostasy, my interest in logic/rationality and epistemology developed during my years of doubts and true agnosticism (when I was genuinely unsure). I think the more interesting question is: if we you were to introduce a true agnostic to rationality and logic, and if they were to genuinely "perfect" the arts of both, would they be more likely to choose theism or atheism? Obviously based on my own experience I'd say the latter, because I do feel that it was rationality that was one of the major things that lead me away from theism to begin with.
One minor correction: In your last sentence, I think you're confusing rationality with rationalization, and they aren't the same. Most rationalizations contain logical flaws and cognitive biases that reveal what the believing brains WANT to believe. Genuine rationality exists to prevent such mistakes. I've said before that I'm only interested in the truth. If God announced himself tomorrow then I would have no qualms about converting to theism and whatever sect he said (and demonstrated) was the right one. Obviously, there are some atheists (mostly the anti-theists) that have deep-seated prejudices against religion for any number of reasons (a gay friend of mind has been brutally persecuted by Christians in his past, so his hatred of the religion stems primarily from that), but I am not one of them. If anything, given that my entire family is Christian, it would be much easier on me if I DID believe. The only thing preventing me from believing is, well, my adherence to genuine rationality.
I grouped these two rebuttals together because they're both committing a different form of the genetic fallacy. I don't think it matters where any idea comes from, it only matters where the evidence is pointing at the time. I know more than one AI researcher who strongly believes that the singularity is not only a possibility but an inevitability. Most of the arguments AGAINST the singularity come from decidedly non-experts in AI that want to lump it under the category of jet-packs and underwater cities. FWIW, I am not convinced the singularity is an inevitability, but I am no AI researcher either. I'm just saying I don't think it belongs in the same category as Tarot Cards, as we already have AI. The question is merely can we develop AI sophisticated enough to mimic (and/or better) the human brain. The only people that can answer that are the people that do it for a living, not ignorant schmucks like you or I.
I don't even know what you mean "the conflict thesis has been discredited by modern historians of science." We have an ongoing war in the US between IDers and Evolutionists who deny evolution solely for the fact that they believe in the literal Genesis creation. How is that not a conflict? How was the conflict between Galileo and the Church not an actual conflict? How are the many demonstrably wrong Biblical claims about cosmology, the earth, biology, or even cures for leprosy? How in funk when God says to get the blood of a bird and do incantations to cure leprosy (14:49) is that NOT in direct conflict with science? Of course, it's not all that hard to "interpret away" many problems in Biblical science by claiming they were just allegories. In modern fiction we call this fanwanking.
This entirely depends on what you mean by "imply." If you mean it in the strict logical sense, then that's true; but if you mean it in the more usual, common sense of "suggest," (as most do) then it's absolutely false. Really, because of the confusion of terms, that's one phrase that needs to be put to rest along with absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The correlation/causation one is a bit trickier than the latter (the latter is simply wrong), but correlation does indeed IMPLY causation (in the common sense of "imply" meaning "suggest'), it just doesn't PROVE causation (which "imply" means in the logical sense). To PROVE causation requires eliminating other variables that could be effecting either side of the correlate.
The conclusions were those of those who did the studies, not mine. You just don't like what they suggest. That's not my fault. If you feel the issue is more about economy than atheism then I'm sure you can provide a study that shows that correlate.
Many things have been shown to lower depression levels and prevent suicides including meditation, music, having pets, having friends, etc. Such a thing is hardly the sole domain of religion and, again, as my studies suggest, such a thing does not aggregate to a larger social level. Besides, the issue is (or was) really about whether more "crazies" were crazed due to religious beliefs or atheism. Showing that belief is mentally beneficial to normal people isn't really limiting the issue to the demographic we're talking about.
I would agree with that, but such considerations make such demographics and statistics a bit sketchy and indefinite. To me, it really comes down to "do you believe in God?" That is either a binary yes/no. If you are unsure, then that's as much a "no" than it is for someone to say they believe strongly there is no God at all. I still consider myself an agnostic atheist, and I define that as someone who doesn't believe in God, who believes the probability of God's existence is extremely low, but also recognizes there is still a huge amount of THE UNKNOWN existing out there where God could possibly be hiding himself.
Last edited by MorpheusSandman; 10-15-2013 at 12:40 PM.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
Despite the word "cosmology" not having come into existence until the middle of the eighteenth century (Wolff, wasn't it?), Humans have been trying to explain how the universe came into being from before Mnemosyne gave birth to Urania (a-muse-ing, no?) right through modern Big Bangers like Steinhardt, Baum et al (in fact, the earliest surviving written texts - the Rigveda - deal with [physical] Origination five millennia in the past) and we've yet to see a scientific explanation for the origination of matter / energy which precipitated it. Personally, I'm in favour of the theory that an enormous elephant shrew was alone in the infinite void when it sneezed itself out of existence and subsequently ejected the initial phantom dark energy from its vast wiggly nose, creating the "hot dense state" which developed into the relationship between Leonard and Penny, but since so few people are familiar with elephant shrews (let alone their wiggly noses), I've thrown in with the 98% of Humanity which doesn't actively believe that there is no God.
Could that other 2% be correct in their assertion that there is no God? The Law of Probabilities says there's a 50-50 chance that they might be - but they still can't explain where that original elephant shrew with the wiggly nose came from.
As I suggested elsewhere, if believers were content to keep their beliefs personal and not project them into everything from public policy to morality to missionary work, I don't think most atheists would have a problem with "living peaceably" with them. Historically, however, this has not been how believers have behaved and, indeed, it's not what's taught in most churches or even in The Bible. Richard Dawkins got into the debate because he discovered that believers were resisting having evolution taught in schools because of religious fundamentalism and were going so far as trying to introduce a pseudo-scientific textbook on Intelligent Design into the public school curriculum. To me, when you have those kinds of situations (and there are many similar ones related to religious beliefs inserting themselves into social policy), I don't see how it's possible for the two sides to "live peaceably."
I don't believe that belief in God is incompatible with being a good scientist (Francis Collins is one superb example), but I do believe it's incompatible with the scientific method. One can not get to God from the latter, and most of the claims made by revelations attributed the former have been debunked thanks to the scientific method. How much do we have to learn before we realize that science is an infinitely better way of understanding the world (and even ourselves) than religion is?
Knowing what I do about cognitive biases I would not expect scientists to be free of such "psychological baggage," because getting rid of such things require a concerted effort, and becoming a scientist doesn't require such an effort. I absolutely agree that scientists can be dogmatic, but wouldn't you also agree that the whole process of testing, retesting, and peer-review keeps such dogmatism in check? What I mean is that it doesn't allow any given scientist to say "this is how things are, and I neither have to test my claims, or submit the results to my peers for extensive criticism!" In fact, one could argue that scientific super-stardom happens when a scientist contradicts a previously paradigmatic model (Einstein over Newton, eg). Science progresses by bettering past science in demonstrable ways that leave little doubt as to their correctness. Religion lacks this testing, peer-review, or demonstrability. It relies entirely on the pronouncements of leaders saying "this is the way it is, and I neither have to prove my claims or submit them to my peers for criticism."
To me, those two ways of coming to understand the world are completely incompatible. What's more, it seems that those scientist that do ascribe to the scientific method (including peer-review) have to mentally compartmentalize to maintain a believe in God, and create a kind of "special pleading" that they wouldn't allow for any other hypothesis or theory. What do you think about all of this?
Last edited by MorpheusSandman; 10-15-2013 at 12:47 PM.
"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being." --Carl Gustav Jung
"To absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists; and may each and every one of us always give the devil his due." --Neil Gaiman; The Sandman Vol. 4: Season of Mists
"I'm on my way, from misery to happiness today. Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh" --The Proclaimers
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