Science and religion

[Darkstar]

Oooh, argument ad populum!

Legitimate authority. They can use science to demonstrate their claims. As for god...

You are blind, blind, blind, blind, so blind, so so blind. Evolutionary theory may be true, but you are still blind, blind, blind, blind. Open your eyes! Look at what you are doing!

Don't you realize that you are presupposing what you are trying to prove?

I am? I thought that was you.

You presuppose that science is the way to validate claims, so science can prove that Christianity is true.

Well, science has been pretty good at validating claims so far. Religion...not so much.

But Christianity has its own authorities and structures of proof. You start off with the assumption that these are valueless, and you ignore them and push them to the side.

Yeah...I do. Because every time religion uses its standards of proof to try and find something, when science applies itself to the same problem, it turns out that religion had it all wrong. Zeus and Thor cause lightning? Poseidon causes tidal waves? Religion has time and time again demonstrated that it is useless at trying to figure out the physical world. Science has demonstrated even more often that it is an excellent tool for such.

(This is where you claim god is non-physical)
But even if god can't be directly observed, shouldn't we at least be able to verify the effects of his actions? That one million dollar prize is just sitting there...if there were so many miracles, wouldn't somebody have taken it already? They could even just give it to charity for crying out loud...

1. Science can verify evolutionary theory, but theology cannot be verified because theological methods do not yield knowledge.

Yep. Well,not quite. Theology (if true) can be verified, but not using methods that are demonstrably fallacious.

You don't argue this, you assume it, because you are blind, blind, blind, blind, blind, blind, so blind. Darkstar, I like you and think you are a nice person. But OPEN YOUR EYES. Do you realize what you are presuposing.

You don't know anything about theological methods. You don't know the evidential status of Duns Scotus or Thomas Aquinas or William of Occam because you have never read them. You don't care. You don't care about all of the different movements in theology, so you don't accept their authority.

That million dollars is collecting an awful lot of dust...

Give me evidence for 1. So many people have mountains of evidence that 1 is false. I have it. I want to cry to badly I feel so angry when I read the ignorance and lies that prevent people from realizing God's nature and how knowable he is, and seeing all the university politics color peoples understanding of theology. God is knowable. There are good arguments for God's existence, but more than that, if you seek God, you will find God.

Well, if it weren't for science, we would still be in the dark ages. If it weren't for religion, we would never have had them in the first place. Give me one important discovery made using theological methods.

Oh, and, again, other atheists here were theists and sought god for decades before finally giving up. Why would god hide himself from people?

I have been in 4 or 5 churches where they regularly see miracles. There is a whole Christian community that has its own authority that is not related to the science world, but why should science be the sole authority in the world?

What about philosophy?

If you want an example of where science was the only authority, look at Communist countries. Science is not everything.

Um, no, that would be the government that was the only authority. The state isn't run by people trying to force science on you. Now, if we want to start talking about middle eastern theocracies...