(April 17, 2015 at 10:43 am)Brian37 Wrote: "burning the candle at both ends", ...
Hmm...I can do that without getting out of bed.
(April 17, 2015 at 10:43 am)Brian37 Wrote: "Debunk science with science" another way of putting it would be...accept[ing] science when they think it works to prop up their own claims, and reject it when it doesn't....and the idiot apologists who use the 2nd law argument are using it to lead you to their god...
Ahhoo...How selective our ears can be when we have lists to tilt in and a dainty lady in the wings....who is really a deity reviewing her Clausius statement of the Second Law in connection with designing a perfect refrigerator. And one can even inject science into religion without invoking a god, if Engineers and Design do get brief mention at the end. See Tomkins on Chimp/Human sequence comparisons at CRS.
(April 17, 2015 at 6:41 pm)Brian37 Wrote: It is more important for most humans to protect their social norms than to admit they got it wrong.
True, and now we're in business. There is indeed safety in numbers as one of your earlier posts said. We Americans (if you're in the USA) are 300 million strong and have the happy combination of a firm government and a pluralistic tradition. We no longer think Amun-Re has sex with the king's mother to create a divine ruler, but there's probably a good reason Egyptians thought so. The world was a very dangerous place for them, without police, with threats of foreign invasion, threats of famine and death in childbirth, and little assurance day-to-day civil order would be maintained. They needed a way to cope with all this and on the whole I feel they acquitted themselves very courageously. Like Egyptians, we have the beliefs we can afford to have. I doubt their society had the option of entertaining a freethinking way; dissent was a threat to civil order for them in a way it is not for us.
Earlier peoples didn't make the sharp division between natural and supernatural that we make. And though I'm thoroughly jaded regarding special claims of the religious kind, I'm also sure our secular-religious distinction is as artificial as any other development in human culture, and worth retaining mainly because it produces useful results for us. While the scientific method itself doesn't depend on religion per se, it does encourage a culture of rationality and secular humanism which has its own social norms and can even function somewhat like religions do when it takes off into issues such as cosmic origins and morality.
That's why I've always thought that when debating the religious (thoughtful ones as opposed to nuts), we should acknowledge that the culture of rationality isn't doing a good job of meeting social, psychological, and existential needs for many people. Otherwise all these religions should wilt as for the most part they can't force their memberships to stay. Theism comes in many flavors but it's a mistake to presume dogma at first blush. Even Christianity displays astonishing diversity of opinion, with people changing affiliations as they search for "church homes" that suit them. Lots of religious are rational enough to work in the sciences and well aware of the arguments deployed against theistic belief.
If the goal is to "convert" them, it is necessary to convince them that believing the cosmos is a giant weather pattern makes more sense than holding some alternative belief. After all, we don't even have precise definitions for what we mean by the terms cognition, intelligence, and purpose, and can hardly expect we've heard the last word on that matter. Sometimes getting it right just isn't that important, especially when it comes to ultimate questions on the nature of reality.
