(December 23, 2016 at 3:25 pm)Anomalocaris Wrote:(December 23, 2016 at 3:20 pm)paulpablo Wrote: I think what people would call hard atheism is unscientific.
People who claim to know there is no God which is basically claiming knowledge about something that isn't testable.
In general practical terms though most atheists just reject religion. And since the mainstream religions make unscientific claims then the absence of belief in those claims could give someone a scientific advantage.
Would you call people who say there is not a big bowl of spaghetti levitating 5000 Kms over the North Pole of Jupiter "unscientific"?
Science is about making probability weighted statements. If the probability of a statement being true, based on what is know, can judged overwhelming, it is waste of breadth to hedge. Any intelligent person, when hearing an unhedged statement about an overwhelming probability, knows the subtlety. Only religious idiots invested in the overwhelmingly improbable somehow being acknowledged as true, would quibble. Just because religious morons take offense at that statement that their god's chance of existing is on par with a bowl of spehatti floating 5000 Kms over Jupiter does not make it less scientific to say "the god of christians does not exist" then to say "the said levitating bowl of spaghetti does not exist"
A big bowl of something is physical where as a lot of people believe god is non physical and non testable therefore outside the realms of science.
If someone says something that is outside the realm of science definitely does or does not exist I'd say they're equally unscientific.
If it's not testable then the scientific response to it should be basically, no comment.
If someone says we're all brains in a jar and this life is all just an illusion but it can't be proven or disproven then that has nothing to do with science, it's just ignorable.
If someone says a giant bowl is floating above a planet then that can be questioned and dismissed as false.
Are you ready for the fire? We are firemen. WE ARE FIREMEN! The heat doesn’t bother us. We live in the heat. We train in the heat. It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home, we’re where we’re supposed to be. Flames don’t intimidate us. What do we do? We control the flame. We control them. We move the flames where we want to. And then we extinguish them.
Impersonation is treason.