An article actually worth reading

[gcomeau]

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/42938/title/Opinion--Science---Religion--A-Centuries-old-War-Rages-On/

The money paragraphs for me (emphasis mine):

"But while science and religion both claim to discern what’s true, only science has a system for weeding out what’s false. In the end, that is the irreconcilable conflict between them. Science is not just a profession or a body of facts, but, more important, a set of cognitive and practical tools designed to understand brute reality while overcoming the human desire to believe what we like or what we find emotionally satisfying. The tools are many, including observation of nature, peer review and replication of results, and above all, the hegemony of doubt and criticality. The best characterization of science I know came from physicist Richard Feynman: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that.”

In contrast, religion has no way to adjudicate its truth claims, for those claims rest on ancient scripture, revelation, dogma, and above all, faith: belief without sufficient evidence. Is there one God, or many? Does he want us to work on the Sabbath? Is there an afterlife? Was Jesus the son of God? The problem, of course, is that faith is no way to decide what’s true. It is, à la Feynman, an institutionalized way of fooling yourself. Religion acts like science in making claims about reality, but then morphs into pseudoscience in the way it rejects disconfirming evidence and insulates its claims against testing. The toolkit of science is—and will remain—the only way to discover what’s real, whether in biology, physics, history, or archaeology. Religion can offer communality and can buttress morality, but has no purchase on truth."

[trotsky]

1. But... but... "other ways of knowing!"

Definitely a worthwhile read, and goes a lot farther shedding a light on the general non-productiveness of these kinds of debates/discussions versus just attacking 'stupid/mean/aggressive/militant' atheists.

But then I've never thought the purpose of a debate/discussion on an Internet forum is to change a participant's mind. Instead it's about the audience - people who are being exposed to new ideas, new ways to question what they were brought up to believe. That's how it worked for me.

[gcomeau]

2. Yeah, I get that one a lot.

And, inevitably, when challenged to explain how exactly they tell the difference between true and false claims of religious knowledge the responses break down into sputtering gibberish or accusations of closed minded "scientism" for asking the question...


(Not that anyone around here would do such a thing...)