Christianity compatible with atheism

[coffeeveritas]

Well, I certainly understand being disenfranchised with religion, I'm pretty much there myself, but isn't it a tad harsh to say that an individual person can't believe in Jesus and appreciate science at the same time?

Yes,a fatuous thing to say. However, in my experience, it's highly unlikely such a person will allow science,evidence or reason to challenge those beliefs. If he did he would cease holding them.

I really don't see science as challenging anything about my beliefs. There was a trend in Christianity that dates back a very long ways that believed that nature was the "second book" that revealed God. It makes sense if you believe that God created the universe that it would be consistent with faith. There are people like Nancey Murphy who use things like quantum mechanics to try to understand the nature of life in Christian philosophy. (She's a philosopher/ psychologist /theologian who writes all kinds of articles about subjects ranging from the quantum Zeno effect to the function of neurons.)

Science doesn't make any value judgments.

Ideally,no it does not,but scientists do all the time,what with being human beings.. Ideally science draws inferences from facts,such as evolution,heliocentricity, gravity.

As important,science declines to draw inferences from lack of facts. .EG the veracity of any religious text.

Holders of faith-based dogma get their panties all out of focus all when science contradicts dogma. Their invariable response is to claim the science is wrong..

Well if scientists draw value judgements, being human, that doesn't make them scientific value judgements, it makes them the personal interpretation of the scientist. So the value judgements of the scientist has no more scientific validity than that of anyone else.

And if science declines to draw inferences from lack of facts, i.e. the veracity of any religious text, then its lack of facts mean that science has no bearing on the veracity of the text. Sure you can't prove the text using science, but that doesn't mean you disbelieve it either. It just means you have no scientific reason to believe it, (because it's not a scientific matter) and thus the debate becomes a philosophical one.

Once again I feel you generalize too much when you say, "holders of faith based dogma get their panties all out of focus all when science contradicts dogma." Members of the religious right? They likely would. Most of the Christians in my crowd? Not even a little bit. Like I said, I have a science background, whatever the data shows it shows. I'm not really worried about it since like I said earlier, science has nothing to say either way about the existence of God. Value judgements from a scientist or from a theologian have no scientific veracity.