He has yet to show us what an atheist is in the first place, so any method he gives may be perfectly valid, but for a wrong definition.
What year did you graduate?
That isn’t really relevant…besides I only tell that to friends…your the guy that’s been giving me trouble on the SDMB.
That doesn’t sound as immaculate as the bible would have us believe.
You’ve suggested you didn’t believe in god back then. Why can’t you keep this straight?
Someone’s convictions and core beliefs aren’t really as strong as he insists they are.
I don’t think his beliefs or convictions are weak. I think he’s playing word games to try to deny the obvious. On top of that it’s a bad denial and it’s in support of a really weak claim (our core beliefs don’t change in adulthood - tell it to this guy) because something something empiricism or something.
Perhaps what pchaos is saying is that for most of us, we accept scientific theory, the part that does not directly affect us, in a way that resembles how religious people accept their mythos and doctrine. I know I personally have not gone to great lengths to check and confirm the work of Darwin, Bohr, Hubble, Einstein or Chandrasekhar, I kind of take it on faith that what they have discovered is more or less correct, even that continuing research supports their analyses.
The biggest problem with the theory of evolution for religious people is that it conflicts with the biblical message that humans are endowed by Og with a special, elevated status. It is a choice between an existence that does or does not have meaning, in a universe that is either designed or evidently meaningless.
By “a choice”, I do not mean to imply that one can simply choose to believe or not believe, any more than one can choose one’s food or sexuality preferences. I am not confident that I could choose to believe in any given religion and then genuinely believe beyond action and lip-service.
Except that the scientific community has demonstrated it knows what it’s doing. We are surrounded by clear evidence that science works. Trusting science to keep doing what it has been doing isn’t the same as taking on blind faith the claims of religion, which has been relentlessly been shown to be wrong when it tries to make claims about the real world, and has no such accomplishments as science to show that there’s some underlying truth to it. Science works; and trusting something that works isn’t the equivalent of faith in something that does not work.
If you think pertinent questions are trouble, then you brought in the trouble when you started making contradictory claims on this message board. When you went went to college certainly matters when you claim you went with the “leftys” yet claimed that you knew nothing about atheism.
The Free Speech Movement was in the mid-'60s.
And
would place it somewhere in the '69-'72 area, I think…but at Cal at Berkeley it would be more in the '71-'74 area.
I’ve read an entire rather large book with additional natural examples of evolution. The real way to check on Darwin is not by going back over what he did (and people have spent plenty of time studying the finches, btw) but by seeing if evolution applies to more species. And it does.
If you have actually read the Origin you would know that Darwin gets the mechanism of inheritance totally wrong. (Not that he claimed to know for sure.) If people worshiped Darwin they’d defend his view, but in fact it has been abandoned - and what has been found to be true supports evolution even better. How this is rationalizing is beyond me.
The other thing to take away from the Cold Fusion farrago is that damn near everyone wanted it to be true. The prevailing emotional bias was hugely in favor of the discovery.
In contrast, the emotions ran hugely against the revolutionary discovery that stomach ulcers were caused by viruses. This ran against deep-set opposition from people who simply didn’t feel it was true.
In both cases, science threw out what it wanted, and stood by the demonstrated facts. Science is not blinkered by what people emotionally prefer… At least not too very much. (Emotions sometimes get in the way a little. Scientists are as human as anybody else!)
Totally wrong? I was astonished to learn that he was able to figure out that heredity was “corpuscular,” instead of being some continuous or infinitely divisible spectrum of characteristics. That knocked me on my butt; I can only marvel at his vast patience, and his detailed record-keeping, which led him to that discovery.
But, yes, certainly there was a hell of a lot he didn’t know. He was very forthright in admitting this.
Fairly accurate, that’s why I can say that Human Action made a rational summary of this thread at that point and time and still disagree with his conclusions. And for those that say the difference is science works. Well…there are plenty of people I know that are willing to say that religion works. All I’m willing to say is that religion sometimes works if you are careful with it.
We can show millions of case where science works.
Not believe it works.
Not think it works.
Not say it works.
We can actually show that it works. At this point, what you say about religion doesn’t even matter-show us cases of religion working. Let’s see a limb grow back. Pray a building into existence. Ask God to give the pilot the proper headings the next time you take a flight. Find the answers to your driver’s test in the Bible.
You’ve said a lot more than that. Are you going to back it up at some point?
And I can say that science works both for the believer, agnostic and unbeliever alike, one very good example is the display you are seeing right now in front of you.
[QUOTE=pchaos;15941524All I’m willing to say is that religion sometimes works if you are careful with it.[/QUOTE]
The problem word there sums the entire breadth of the religion problem: “sometimes”. Religious doctrine lacks the flexibility to tolerate “sometimes”, because its inspiration is divine and holy. If some scientific principle fails, we can figure out why and adjust – it may take a while, but adaptability is built-in. If dogma fails, there is nowhere to go, because it is declared to be absolute and correct: “sometimes” is just not satisfactory for a thing that makes those claims.