[QUOTE=the raindog]
Take a shot of Pepto-Bismol and belly up to the keyboard.
Please note that I am not taking a position for God in this thread. AFAIK, he doesn’t exist.
No my friend, I’m a minuteman patrolling the borders of science and doing my darndest to keep the undesirables at bay.
If you’d like to be my brother at arms, I extend to you the secret handshake of atheism. We simply require intellectual purity.
We don’t violate the objective accomplishments and sterling record of science by forcing words and subjective doctrines down it’s throat.
Sure, we accept that our atheism is subjective in nature. In the same breath, and as a means of distinguishing us from the subjective caprice of the believers, we are quite willing to defend our beliefs with objective fact, science, reason and logic. It’s a devastating combination I tell you.
I’m aware that some would call that witnessing. But by maintaining intellectual honesty, science isn’t denigrated into a defacto religion.
Can I count on your support?
[/QUOTE]
Are you calling me out? :dubious:
Suffice to say, it’s flatly dishonest to equate religious faith (belief in the absence of and perhaps defiance of various evidence) with “scientific faith” (belief supported by and refusing to ignore any evidence). And once you recognize that equating the two terms is dishonest, you then recognize that applying the term ‘religious’ to scientific belief is hyperbolic. Put simply, science is not a religion. Period. If it even begins to approach being a religion, it’s long since stopped being anything resembling science, and we’d be able to tell that immidately by the rampant idiocy which would have grown up surrounding it.
This business about God being inaccessible and therefore unprovable is garbage. the term capital-G-God does not refer to some deistic entity that observes passively from the wings; it refers to an entity that meddles with detectable reality regularly. And, just like we regularly detect things only indirectly, through their effects, similarly we could theoretically detect God by its effects. Gravity’s invisible too, but that doesn’t stop us from scientifically studying it.
Regardless, the atheistic position is the rational defaut position, realizing that the rational atheistic position would accept good, compelling evidence for God (or for Odin, or Thor, or Vishnu, or ghosts, or leprachauns, or unicorns, or FSMs, or orbiting teapots), if such evidence should arrive and present itself in a way that unambiguously suggests that God (or whatever) is the actual cause of the evidence in question.
Of course, not such evidence has appeared, which is why there are still athests. Enough said.
Nicely put.
