Science is so superior

[Bill Haywood]

I've been a hardboiled atheist since at least 7th grade, probably before. But I get really annoyed with the eggheads who hop around saying how religion is irrational, science is so superior, and religion is the cause of countless wars.

Most scientists are believers, including some of the best. Their faith in a deity arranging the big bang has not hindered their research.

Plenty of atheists believe the breathless stupidity about a missle hitting the Pentagon on 911.

Believers are no more suseptible to foolishness and state sponsored atrocities than atheists. People have endless capacity for believing nonsense, being tricked by propaganda, even without the use of religion. Race science was a major component of the Holocaust. The science of eugenics, racial superiority -- the empirical community largely collaborated with the final solution.

Some of the greatest massacres of the 20th century were carried out by atheist materialists. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao.

And take our own neocons who are at the helm of empire. The brain trust that put us in Iraq is largely secular Jewish. Many, if not most, are atheists who, like their hero Straus, see religion as useful for manipulating the rabble, but don't care for it themselves. Our own blood thirsty empire has its religious components, but much of it is a secular business enterprise.

Guys like Dawkins should stop complaining about believers and start stopping his socialist, secular British Labor Party from killing kids for oil. That's crude oil Blair fights for, not holy oil.

I don't know of one single advantage provided by atheism, other than seeming more sensible in the very narrow, abstract conversation about evidence and origins. It's just the way I understand the world, it doesn't make me kind.

I'd much prefer the world were run by nice, warm folks at the United Church of Christ or the Fellowship on Reconciliation that the blood dripping m-fking atheist neocons.

End rant.

[vhawk01]

Oh my god, this one guy I know who is an atheist is like a total moron! But guess what? You arent going to BELIEVE this! I know this really smart guy, and he's a Christian through and through! So much for that theory huh!?!?!"

Thanks for the rant though, it was very inspirational.

[vhawk01]

Oh, and I can think of at least one advantage of atheism. It gives people one less way of labelling another group as outsiders and undesirables. There are still ways, but for the atheist there is one less.

Plus, chicks dig atheists and everyone knows this. Disagreeing only means you are in denial.

[Speedlimits]

[ QUOTE ]
I've been a hardboiled atheist since at least 7th grade, probably before. But I get really annoyed with the eggheads who hop around saying how religion is irrational, science is so superior, and religion is the cause of countless wars.

Most scientists are believers, including some of the best. Their faith in a deity arranging the big bang has not hindered their research.

Plenty of atheists believe the breathless stupidity about a missle hitting the Pentagon on 911.

Believers are no more suseptible to foolishness and state sponsored atrocities than atheists. People have endless capacity for believing nonsense, being tricked by propaganda, even without the use of religion. Race science was a major component of the Holocaust. The science of eugenics, racial superiority -- the empirical community largely collaborated with the final solution.

Some of the greatest massacres of the 20th century were carried out by atheist materialists. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao.

And take our own neocons who are at the helm of empire. The brain trust that put us in Iraq is largely secular Jewish. Many, if not most, are atheists who, like their hero Straus, see religion as useful for manipulating the rabble, but don't care for it themselves. Our own blood thirsty empire has its religious components, but much of it is a secular business enterprise.

Guys like Dawkins should stop complaining about believers and start stopping his socialist, secular British Labor Party from killing kids for oil. That's crude oil Blair fights for, not holy oil.

I don't know of one single advantage provided by atheism, other than seeming more sensible in the very narrow, abstract conversation about evidence and origins. It's just the way I understand the world, it doesn't make me kind.

I'd much prefer the world were run by nice, warm folks at the United Church of Christ or the Fellowship on Reconciliation that the blood dripping m-fking atheist neocons.

End rant.

[/ QUOTE ]

Most elite scientists are either agnostic/atheist.

Your biology teacher is not a scientist.

[luckyme]

[ QUOTE ]
Most elite scientists are either agnostic/atheist.

Your biology teacher is not a scientist.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm always surprised when people think their doctor is a scientist... well, not any more.

luckyme

[Bill Haywood]

[ QUOTE ]
Most elite scientists are either agnostic/atheist.


[/ QUOTE ]

I've heard that and happily accept it. I do have pride in the hard headed realism of atheism. But so what. It's not what makes elite scientists elite. It's the research, imagination, and execution that does that, not their opinion of what happened at the untestable moment before the big bang.

Plenty of atheist researchers who were/are tops in their fields also participate(ed) in death machines.

There is no moral advantage or disadvantage in atheism. Nor does it make a difference in scientific success (except on the single question of what came before the BB). I do like to think that top scientists' predominant atheism is reflective of their unflinching honesty and perspecuity. But there's no scientific question that that helps in because all science is post BB.

Come to think of it, I think I could make a case for materialists being more susceptible to ideological rationalizations for participating in the death machines of Stalin, Hitler, and Bush. We have far more ways of fooling ourselves. Take the Stanford Milgram experiment where they used tricks of authority to get students to abuse each other. Who will be stronger in refusing to participate in such cruelty, the simple, devout pacifist who obeys Jesus' injunction to love thy neighbor, or the atheist therorist who gets caught up in cost benefit analysis of the utility of torture?

[Jim T]

[ QUOTE ]
Come to think of it, I think I could make a case for materialists being more susceptible to ideological rationalizations for participating in the death machines of Stalin, Hitler, and Bush.

[/ QUOTE ]

+ others.

I guess you're shooting to be a prime example of your thesis.

[Johnny Drama]

[ QUOTE ]

Plus, chicks dig atheists and everyone knows this.

[/ QUOTE ]
I can't tell if you're kidding.

[cambraceres]

Elite scientists often have a high sense of order in their lives, and are typicslly not given to abstract faith. This said, imagine a scientist who can throw his cognitive faculty in the trash by accepting a theology so diametrically opposed to all he stands for as a supremely logical being.

Now if you are trying to say there have been many elite scientists of the past with a predilection for religious belief then you may be right, but these are typically in antiquity.

Liebniz is the last I can think of, the most recent I mean. And by the way, if you consider Liebniz' priciple of indiscernables with a few axioms obvious in his other writings, one can formulate the logical edifice of modern Quantum Theory. Now Liebniz himself, at the pivotal moment, when forced to chose how nature decides which reality to manifest, said that god simply chose "the best of all possible worlds", rather than come to the more reasonable model based on the stochastic nature of reality.

Cam

I already posted his in the wrong thread, here it is in a more proper place.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Most elite scientists are either agnostic/atheist.

Your biology teacher is not a scientist.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm always surprised when people think their doctor is a scientist... well, not any more.

luckyme

[/ QUOTE ]

Trust me. Physicians are NOT scientists. They took the same freshman classes, end of comparison.

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
Most elite scientists are either agnostic/atheist.


[/ QUOTE ]

I've heard that and happily accept it. I do have pride in the hard headed realism of atheism. But so what. It's not what makes elite scientists elite. It's the research, imagination, and execution that does that, not their opinion of what happened at the untestable moment before the big bang.

Plenty of atheist researchers who were/are tops in their fields also participate(ed) in death machines.

There is no moral advantage or disadvantage in atheism. Nor does it make a difference in scientific success (except on the single question of what came before the BB). I do like to think that top scientists' predominant atheism is reflective of their unflinching honesty and perspecuity. But there's no scientific question that that helps in because all science is post BB.

Come to think of it, I think I could make a case for materialists being more susceptible to ideological rationalizations for participating in the death machines of Stalin, Hitler, and Bush. We have far more ways of fooling ourselves. Take the Stanford Milgram experiment where they used tricks of authority to get students to abuse each other. Who will be stronger in refusing to participate in such cruelty, the simple, devout pacifist who obeys Jesus' injunction to love thy neighbor, or the atheist therorist who gets caught up in cost benefit analysis of the utility of torture?

[/ QUOTE ]

There is no moral advantage to most (all?) scientific theories and explanations. Unfortunately, they still best explain the reality we observe. Whether an agnostic view holds some sort of moral advantage is quite beside the point. I might argue that it does in fact do this, but I certainly cant argue that I should be a theist because there is no good reason to be agnostic. Is this really just a watered down Pascal's wager?

[vhawk01]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Plus, chicks dig atheists and everyone knows this.

[/ QUOTE ]
I can't tell if you're kidding.

[/ QUOTE ]

Really? The next part, "and disagreeing with this just shows you are in denial" wasn't in any way a clue?

[Mickey Brausch]

There's a very interesting review of Richard Dawkins The God Delusion done by Terry Eagleton, a Professor of English Literature at Manchester University. The review is on The London Review of Books (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html).

Here is a choice sample:

[ QUOTE ]
Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.
<font color="white"> . </font>
The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.
<font color="white">. </font>
The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.
<font color="white"> . </font>
Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth fairy.
<font color="white"> . </font>
Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever.
<font color="white"> . </font>
This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism.


[/ QUOTE ]

Mickey Brausch

[madnak]

[ QUOTE ]
Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

[/ QUOTE ]

Whoa. Hey txag, where do I sign up, man?