Only in your mind.
I will not wade into the “compartmentalization” issue, but your claim that anyone who offers an opinion different from your dearly held beliefs (for which you generally supply no support) must be deluded or lying is nonsense.
If you must make that sort of unsupported claim, open a thread in IMHO to wave around your personal opinion.
The problem with the OP is that, although it does ask the correct question, it leads off with a title that begs the question and it is not sufficiently clear that the opinions of various religious types is silly.
We may well ask why some, (actually a small, if vocal, minority), religious people believe that there is a “scientific agenda against religion,” the reality is that there is no such agenda. There are a few scientists who do have antipathy to religion, but “science” has no such agenda and expressing the question in that way simply buys into the nonsense promoted by that tiny group (or the even tinier group of scientists–not “science”–who might have such an agenda).
I’m always a bit bemused at how, in threads like this, some of the people who are the loudest exponents of science and the scientific approach, make such unscientific, un-empirical claims about what religious people are like.
There maybe some people who make claims about religious people, but even Jesus seemed to despise the Pharisees who wore their religious symbols on their person, and kept the letter of the law, but not the spirit. It is my understanding that he preferred sinners to the outward looking Pharisees who were so involved in noticing the sins of others they forgot (or didn’t want) to think of their own wrong doings, It is my interpretation that one should first take care of their own faults and then worry about the wrongs of others. His quote about the Adulteress, was:, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”.
Oh really? I suppose you have scientific evidence of religion then? Your religion naturally; no one is going to claim that science supports someone else’s religion.
Someone simply can’t simultaneously believe in science and something that contradicts science without seriously compartmentalizing their beliefs.
Well, there are scientists who say that you can be religious and scientific. Are you an authority on their thinking?
I believe that science does not contradict many religions. (There. Your generalizations have gotten you into a corner again.) I gave you a link to a great number of scientists that believe there is no contradiction of religions in science.
I believe that your post makes claims for which there is no evidence. That’s not very scientific.
As we say in the Church of the SubGenius, Der, "You do not use your mind to think about your religion!"
The interesting thing is that if you look at scientific work, you cannot tell the difference between a scientist who is a believer and a scientist who is an atheist. Excluding creationists and other charlatans, a proper scientific paper by the most devout of Christians could be written by an atheist with no reservations. I think we can all agree on this. (350 years ago scientific papers commonly mentioned God, but no longer.)
This is very curious if God has any visible hand in the natural world. But it appears that we have no need for this hypothesis. To all intents and purposes, when we look at the world in a scientific way, God does not exist.
There are two solutions to this dilemma. The first is to claim that science is wrong and is ignoring God, but none of us here are that foolish. The other is to define God to be scientifically invisible, which is unfalsifiable.
If we can “see” God (obviously not directly, but through his effects on the world) we can see him scientifically. Why do you think we appear not to be able to?
Of course. Religion is thousands of years old and hardly some obscure phenomenon. If they are religious then they are going to insist that religion is scientifically valid, because denial of reality is at the core of religion. That’s extremely predictably and requires no personal knowledge of them or their scientific fields whatsoever, because it’s not about them or their science; it’s about religion. As believers, their word and their judgement is worth nothing on anything touching their religion.
Hardly. That’s just because religion has systematically lost whenever it has confronted science. Those religions are clinging to a tiny remnant of what they used to claim, a remnant carefully crafted so as to say nothing about anything that can be detected or studied because whenever they do, they are proven wrong. Being wrong is a core feature of religion; its history of constantly being disproved whenever confronting science simply demonstrates it.
I have made no claims for scientific “evidence” of religion. I simply noted that your odd claim that they (must) contradict each other occurs only in your mind. There are certainly religious beliefs (e.g., a 6,000 year old earth that was created in a particular fashion in six days), that are contradicted by science, but a claim that “religion” and “science” contradict each other is merely a belief of yours that is not supported by actual evidence.
Again. You are setting up a nice straw man to burn.
I see no reason for a scientist to insist that religion is “scientifically valid.” That is simply something that you need for a scientist to say so that you can say “harummpph!.”
It is rather like Fundamentalist Christians setting up silly objections to science by pretending that “science” claims that evolution “proves” there is no god. I don’t recall any good scientist actually making that claim. (A claim that there is no need for a god to explain evolution is not the same as pretending that evolution “proves” that god does not exist.)
A religion which makes no claims at all about the natural world cannot be contradicted by science, I agree. I bet even DerTrihs would agree to that.
Now let’s say the religion does make claims. One case is that the religion only makes claims that have been established by science or a science-like method, and that these claims are provisional. An example of this is that the Dalai Lama said that if Buddhism disagrees with science, Buddhism must change. I believe that official Catholic cosmology is now scientifically accurate. In these cases religion does not conflict with science, but follows it.
The interesting case is when religion says something about the natural world before science can speak - specifically before the tools to discover the fact existed, and that these facts are said to come from a source with special knowledge, god, angels, devils, what have you. A good hit rate for this kind of thing would be good evidence that this entity exists. There have been many such claims from all sorts of religions. Have they come true in numbers greater than can be expected from chance?
It’s really similar to UFOs. Many supposed contactees (like Adamski) claimed to have gotten knowledge about the world from the aliens. It has always turned out that this information is either available from standard sources or just plain wrong. How would you feel about someone who said that belief in little green men does not contradict science? The lack of evidence does not prove there are no spaceships buzzing us, but believers in them don’t have much of a leg to stand on, do they?
Hardly. That’s why you can’t come up with any scientific evidence for religion - there is none. Nor is pointing out the fundamental contradiction between religious and scientific thinking original to me.
I don’t see why my position is any more unreasonable than pointing out that Santa Claus is an unscientific belief, and any scientist who believed in Santa Claus and science would have to heavily compartmentalize his beliefs.
Because as a religious person that is his function; to assert the truth of his religion under all circumstances.
So? I have not argued that position. You, on the other hand, have made the absurd claim that religion and science contradict each other. Trying to create a straw man of my position does nothing to correct the error in yours.
I have never accused you of an original thought.
However, I have never claimed that beliefs cannot or should not be “compartmentalized.” You, on the other hand, have explicitly made the claim that science and religion are, in and of themselves, contradictory–a position that has no basis in fact.
So what? Is democracy “scientifically valid”? Is an appreciation of art “scientifically valid”? Is human love “scientifically valid”? You have created a false category of belief in which you insist that all thoughts must be “scientifically validated” and you want to push all the square, triangular, pentagonal, and other shapes into your round hole. As long as his religion does not contradict science, thee is no need to run around testing it for “scientific validity.” We are back to your beliefs that are not really relevant outside your world view.
I’ve known a few who didn’t. I’ve met religious people who say, “This is what I believe, but I am not so vainglorious or hubristic as to insist that it has to be true. I hold it to be true, but I know this is based on faith, not evidence.”
Martin Gardner, one of the giants of the skeptical movement, had faith.
When a religious belief is of the same sort of tenuous subjectivity as personal tastes and preferences, it stops being hostile to alternative viewpoints. Not all religious people are hyper-fundamentalist literalist creationist bigots. (Damn well far too many are, but that would be true even if there were only one!)
Love is clearly scientifically valid. We can measure its effects on us. We can falsify it (and people do all the time.) We can do studies about it. If you claim that love is scientifically invalid, you are saying all of psychology is also.
Love of God is just as valid, by the way. It’s the thing that people love which you guys claim can’t be studied. Any supposed interaction of god and man can be studied. Heck, even the Flood is a scientific hypothesis - a falsified one, but one nevertheless.
Depends on who you speak to, some say it’s a story meant as a moral play most probably based on a local flood event, these people (which is the majority of Christians) don’t believe that whole world was flooded.
Fundamentals are loonies and to compare a modern Catholic with a fire and brimstone Baptist is wrong. The mistake us atheists make sometimes is assuming all Christians are fundamentals when in fact they are not.
I get the impression that you think he should say things like “That’s the way it is, you brats, so accept it!” in a nasty tone of voice, or that Stephen Hawking would if he were able to. 
I suspect that you are referring to the condition of “being in love,” an emotional state that has been measured and examined. I am not sure that actual love in its various forms has quite so much “scientific validity,” although I am willing to withdraw that portion of my question.
As to psychology being “scientifically valid,” we can find a number of posters who would challenge that assertion. 
I don’t mean head shrinking, I mean scientific psychology. My daughter is getting a PhD in psychology (and marketing) and she does more math than I do as an engineer. The experiments she sets up are as rigorous as those in physics, and a dismaying number falsify her hypothesis. Not all psychologists are Bob Newhart.