Why Do people Promote the idea that Science is a religion?

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I disagree on your definition. Modern religion is all faith and whatnot, but this has not always been the case. Religion serves particular functions in the human need to for a belief system. Humans need beliefs, ideas,

The modern dichotomy between faith and knowledge is largely a product of scientific thought processes. If one ignores their respective epistemologies, I imagine they serve a very similar function in the human conscious worldview. Where religion once gave people an impression of knowledge of the function of reality, of some higher and objective truth, science now fills that role. Which one is right is irrelevant.

It is interesting to note that the common man, cowering in some corner of the far reaches of the empire of thought is unequipped to form critical evaluations on scientific theories. If he is to believe scientists, it must be in good faith because the reasoning by which they arrive at their conclusions is as inaccessible to him as the mysteries of divine revelation.

Oh, and the idea that evolution is scientific fact* has become a mantra of the masses, too.
Thanks for reminding me.

*"fact" that is often disproven, sooner or later.

So, it's a word game scientists play when they say "evolution is a scientific fact", because "scientific facts" can change upon further discovery, whereas truth cannot.
So, they declare (often quite loudly and emotionally during interviews), that evolution is a "fact!", and that it "did happen!", but what they're cleverly mixing in there for confusion's sake is "scientific fact", which ranks below truth in reliability.
(But, as I've said before, they're wrong in even calling it a "scientific fact", unless they've produced single-cell evolution into a human being in a lab.)

What really gets to me is how creations claim the bible to be Truth, as well as claiming the resurrection to be truth And they have not provided one f*****g piece of physical evidence! If Jesus is alive, I want to meet with him or at least talk to him in person BEFORE I DIE! So if creationism is correc than HOW THE HELL does it work??????
If God made the first man out of mud JUST EXACTLY HOW did he do it? HOW did mud spontaneously organize into a fully grown adult human???

BTW Ragtime: if the bible is truth can you come up with an experiment that I can perform myself to DEMONSTRATE that its truth? For right now, the bible is just a BOOK. I could right a book that says the Earth is flat and the Moon is made of Green Chesee but does that make it TRUE? I dont think so .

At least humans studying nature are more likely to come close to the objective truth than humans daydreaming about it.



Versus religion, which NEVER admits its mistakes and has the firm goal to propagate its dogma in pure, crystalline form forever.



What you describe is not science. Many scientists are indeed passionate, but we are trained for years how to achieve objective results despite our passion. Furthermore, the world is full of other scientists, with conflicting passions, who will do their best to tear down our work and convince all the other scientists that the projects we have spent years on are utter BS. Even having a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal does not make it dogma - it just achieves a wider audience to find problems with it.
The most common complaint that scientists have when debating on most boards is that we're too mean. If someone presents a flawed idea, we will mercilessly shred it with logic and contradicting data.

As far as "Expelled"...
Remember, first, that this movie is narrated by a man who claims, "Science makes you kill people." That is a direct quote. This is the movie embroiled in several purgery claims, including with Yoko Ono.
This is the movie denounced by the Anti-Defamation League.
This is the movie whose producers lied to biologists in order to get interviews.
This is the movie that even Fox News reviewers dissed.

As far as the supposed 'victims' of dogmatic 'darwinism.' you are showing your credulosity.

Richard Sternberg

Guillermo Gonzalez

Caroline Crocker

Robert Marks

Pamela Winnick

Michael Egnor

Last edited by sojournertruth on 06 May 2008, 2:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

A-MEN Sistah! Couldnt have said it better myself . Relgion, dear Ragtime, is all about MAKING UP STORIES AND MYTHS to manipulate people to behave a certain way! God sure as hell never told ME personally that he made all the creatures on earth while playing in the mud . Its written in a BOOK which christians CLAIM is the word of God but claims are meaningless without irrefutable PHYSICAL evidence. So if evolution is just a "fact" but not truth, and since facts "keep changing due to new evidence".....is the notion that the earth is a spherical solid and not a flat disc just a "fact" and not immutable TRUTH?????????

Last edited by D1nk0 on 06 May 2008, 2:41 pm, edited 3 times in total.

By the way:
The idea that organisms change and diversify over time - sometimes very little, sometimes more so - is a theory.
The idea that organisms do so by a process of natural selection is a theory.

that natural selection occurs is an observed fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth

That speciation occurs is an observed fact.

observed instances of speciation

more observed instances of speciation

neologism in canary island lizard

Most atheists (including myself) ARE also agnostics.

agnostic = lack of (a-) knowledge (-gnosis)
atheist = lack of (a-) belief in divinity (-theism)

The two terms do not conflict.

Passion is just fine when it influences the brainstorming of hypotheses, it's when you are test the hypothesis that passion has no place.

Evolution itself is a fact. Natural Selection is the rigorously tested theory used to EXPLAIN that fact. Just like gravity is a fact and General Relativity is the theory used to explain that fact. It is a common mistake to confuse facts with hypotheses and theories used to EXPLAIN those facts.

Where is Ragtime? Looks like he's chickening out...........

Wrong, many atheist are just as post-militant about denying the possibility of any deeper non-material or "super natural" possibilities, as christians are about supporting them.
The slightest mention of any theory which suggests that there may be an afterlife, or their may be a soul, even in it's spoken from a theoretical scientific perspective, gets laughed at and cut down before even being given a fair chance among hardline atheists. And, what if some of that "super natural" s**t ended up being true? What if there is some form of afterlife? The religion on modern science (which doesn't even follow the scientific method) would never let people discover it if it were true.
The main difference between a christian or muslim fanatic and a scientific fanatic ideologically are that a religious fanatic grabs onto the unknown or "super natural" too hard, scientists grab onto the known or "natural" too hard. Problem there is, who decides what is natural? How can you prove what is natural beyond our 5 senses? I'm not trying to put out some post modernist crap, but if there is some sort of afterlife, some sort of deeper reality, well then that could impact our lives here, how we live life, etc.
You see I am taking a more agnostic approach to this, not an atheist approach, but an skeptical, agnostic approach.

I'm glad you said that, snake. I couldn't have put it better myself.

Sorry, these threads just get too boring for me sometimes.

1) hypotheses come from asking questions and trying to answer them in a logical way

2)science doesn't answer that question... beyond making offspring, anyway.

This statement doesn't actually contradict anything Odin wrote above. He said "Most atheists are also agnostics" and explained the definitions he's using. You then said he was wrong because "many" atheists are strong atheists who actively deny the possibility of anything that would be classed as supernatural.

OK, I agree such people exist, but does that actually imply anything about most (i.e. more than half of) atheists? Maybe he is wrong. I've never done a random sample of atheists to see where the numbers lie, but certainly most of those I've interacted with have been of the variety he's talking about.




I'm glad to see you're adding the qualifier "hardline".




It's a logical possibility, to be sure. But not all possibilities are equal. Some are more probable than others.




This statement's meaning is ambiguous. Are you saying that the "religion [of] modern science" doesn't follow the scientific method, or that "modern science" doesn't?

It's common for people to simply accept any claim with the superficial appearance of science without examining it, and this is unfortunate, but ultimately everyone's beliefs defer, to some degree, to expertise. As long as one realizes that this should be tentative, and has a reasonable heuristic for recognizing how trustworthy expertise is, this necessity isn't too evil. But expertise shouldn't be mistaken for authority, which shouldn't properly exist in science. Making this mistake is one thing that could lead to a "religion of modern science".

As for "the scientific method", that's a more complex topic than most people realize, and there are a bunch of ideas on what the proper method ought to be. Luckily there's enough similarity in these ideas that it's usually possible to agree that some things are scientific, others aren't, but there's usually a third set that's ambiguous (the social sciences usually fall there, for example).




I'm kind of a purist about the word "proof" and always hate seeing it in the context of science (where it doesn't belong unless one is digressing into mathematics or formal logic).

We don't know what there is beyond what we can measure. There are an infinite number of possibilities. In fact, there are even an infinite number of possible theories that would correctly describe any data set we can measure. But some are more parsimonious than others, and the more parsimonious they are, the more seriously they are taken. The less parsimonious ones are strictly possible, but they must assert more in order to explain the same amount, and are thus less likely until the more parsimonious possibilities have been convincingly ruled out.

Of course, because knowledge is probabilistic, a hypothesis that's not the most likely given the data is often the correct one. But this is no more to the point than the fact that one can use bad reasoning to come to a conclusion that happens to be true. It doesn't mean that that particular form of bad reasoning in general is the best way to reach conclusions, and the above fact doesn't mean that believing less parsimonious hypotheses is justified.

Scientific methodologies are the best tools we've had so far to get to truth, but even they don't get you there in a straight line. It's more like a random walk that's biased toward truth.




I think the entire point of Odin's post was that the term "atheist" as he (and many, if not most others) apply it to themselves refers to lack of belief in gods rather than to any explicitly held position beyond that. It's common then to apply that to the same absence of belief they have in, say, jackalopes. I.e., it's a possibility, but one for which the evidence is thus far insufficient to conclude that it's true.

if you got funding for that project... you'd have it made for BILLIONS of years.

i honestly don't think you know enough about the mechanics of evolution to give it any constructive criticism (<3) just like i doubt i have enough info to argue facets of the bible and other religious texts... for both sides: it's not enough to argue against evolution cause god says it doesn't work that way nor is it probably wise to jeopardize your soul just because religion offers no facts.

but if we're gonna crap on evolution, find me a scientific article on evolution and let's discuss what's wrong with it.

true- you'd be stupid to believe anything that's published... but but it's equally ignorant to through out an entire genre of theory just because not every facet agrees. it's certainly acceptable to argue over points and that's all science claims to do... to me, this aspect of science is equivocal to all the varieties of religion, not to mention denominations/sects within any one given religion! so i always fail to see any logic behind this argument as to why all of scientific "fact" is crap.