Religion and Science are 1000% Opposite

[SteveII]

Science cannot tell us that it is wrong to randomly kill, that people should not be enslaved, or that a majestic mountainscape is more beautiful than a dump. These are truths that have been arrived at some other way.

Why do you call them truths? What exactly is a truth? You're the one claiming that they exist without the presence of humans being required, so what  exactly are they?

Tell me how a truth that people should not be enslaved or that a mountainscape is beautiful could continue to exist if all humans were wiped out tomorrow. How does this truth work? How does it have an effect on the universe? How did it come about?

Like the concept of a god or a soul, it's a form of equivocation, something that people believe exists but don't even know what it could possibly be.

Truth = in accordance with fact or reality. 

I never said these truths were independent of humans. The only truths I said were independent (necessarily true--as in could not be otherwise) are math and logic. It is obvious that all truth is not scientific. Examples: it is morally wrong to murder someone. It is true that humans are affected by natural beauty. Freedom is better than slavery.

Numbers, Maths and logic are human inventions used to describe reality. Without humans they would not exist.
No, they are not. They would exist regardless of if humans came around. They were discovered, not invented.

I can provide you with a paradox where two mutually exclusive statements are simultaneously both true. This would not happen if logic was discovered. If Maths and logic were discovered then why can't we decide if zero is a natural number, or what the result is if you raise it to the power of 1.

How can geometry, a form of Maths, have been discovered if there are no perfect circles, or even shapes, in nature? How can pi have been discovered if it's impossible to completely calculate? It does not exist in nature. How can an imaginary number exist without humans to use it?

You say "They would exist regardless of if humans came around", how would they exist? Explain exactly what form they would exist in without the presence of humans.

If every human and every human record were erased, every one of the concepts you described would still exist. This is illustrated simply by the fact that if a new species evolved with the ability to reason, it would discover these very same things about reality (numbers, Pi ratios, logic, etc.). 

Ethics are a product of society and evolved instincts.

Science did not aid in their discovery. Reasoning did. Something else discovered, not invented.

Again explain what an ethic is and how it can have an effect on the universe if there are no humans. Where did it come from? How did it come about? What does it consist of? Where does it get its energy from?

Depends on your view. My view is that most ethical truths are intuited. Others say they are reasoned. Either way, they are still ethical truths. It is wrong to murder, lie and steal. Ethics requires humans. 

Human consciousness is a product of the brain.

Did we discover what the meaning of "I" is through science? Nope.

Meaningless statement. Meaning is context specific and something needs to assign meaning to something else. Humans apply meaning to things. Meaning does not exist without something intelligent embodied in a specific context for that meaning. You can see this with most forms of artificial intelligence. They may seem intelligent but their inputs have no meaning to them because they are not embodied in the real world.

But we can demonstrate that consciousness is a product of the brain because physical changes to the brain either affect, stop or kill off consciousness, e.g. narcotics, anesthetic, brain damage or neuro-degenerative diseases. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that consciousness continues to exist after death. Nor is there is any example of complex patterns of energy continuing to exist without the use of matter anywhere in nature. So why assume that it happens with the brain?

The first paragraph is all about philosophy. Science cannot provide meaning to anything! It only describes. 

It is a fact that the physical brain is not the same thing as consciousness. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon. 

We don't know that scientific laws cannot be explained using the scientific method. 

The laws require a foundation all addressed in some philosophy of science--not itself a scientific truth (next section)

Why do they?

The goal of philosophy of science is not to answer scientific questions, but to answer questions about science. This means philosophers of science have spent a good bit of time trying to find the line between science and non-science, trying to figure out the logic with which scientific claims are grounded, working to understand the relation between theory and empirical data, and working out the common thread that unites many disparate scientific fields  (from this link)

You are almost there. The scientific method is not the only way to investigate reality. It works in matters pertaining to the natural world. Reality consists of more than the natural world. 

So you're saying that reality also consists of the unnatural world? How do you define natural? Why can't this 'unnatural reality' be investigated using physical means? If you believe that your god can sense and act within the natural world (if not then your god is not relevant and does not need to be worshiped), or that demons exist, then why should it only work one way? That's special pleading. Why should the beings that you think exist in a 'spiritual' reality be able to sense and act within the natural world but natural things be unable to affect the spirit world?  

The natural world is any physical thing that exists that is subject to our laws of nature. I believe that natural events can have supernatural causes (definition of a miracle). Science is by definition the study of the natural world. Supernatural causes are outside it's ability to investigate or comment on. It can examine the effect--just not the cause. That is not special pleading. You are attempting to apply science beyond its definition. Why would you say that natural things do not affect the supernatural world? How do you know? 

Listen, most of this is probably a combination of imprecise language and a little bit of misunderstanding of what science is and is not. I enjoyed the discussion and if you want to zero in on something and keep going, that's fine with me.

I agree that much of the problem is that we both have very different usages of the same words, such as what a truth is etc.

Yes. But we also disagree on some very critical issues related to the role and abilities of science.