(January 16, 2016 at 7:24 am)robvalue Wrote: Physicists are not an authority on saying whether stories written in books, with no supporting evidence, are true. In fact, no one is.
This is what ticks me off about well intended liberals who try to treat science and religion as separate but equal. This is also why I think Dawkins "God Delusion" and morso Victor Stenger's two books "God The Failed Hypothesis" and "The New Atheism", combined are why the idea of splitting the baby is not a good way of looking at science.
It is true that scientists can and do hold religious beliefs, and many can and do leave their religion out of the lab, but this apology we are needlessly having to deal with is precisely why the well intended sense of empathy and fairness is not a good thing to coddle.
If one watches the entire new Cosmos series with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, they should be able to see the the same gatekeeper fallacy throughout our species history. Humans stupidly attach our natural curiosity and ability to make discovery to the divine, the same mistake they make when attaching wealth and success to the divine.
The believer, be they Christian, or Muslim or Jew or Hindu or whatever, point to their scientists but that is still not evidence of one religion being true or one god being real. They are still stuck with those competing claims and still stuck with a gap answer and still stuck with the problem of infinite regress.
"I am smart so therefor" is not an argument. Once you start inserting apology into a lab you poison the objectivity of the process.
