Daydreamer

Your making a hasty generalization - by the same logic:

--------------------
*I have read about Rev. Fred Phelps' Gay-bashing

*I have seen the anti-gay protestors after Matthew Shepard's death.

*Jack Chick has a number of anti-gay tracts

Ergo, most Christians hate gays and lesbians.
--------------------

Now of course, this ignores the less visual Christians, such as the Unitarians, Nondenominationals, etc., just as yours ignores James Randi, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, etc.

Sojourner553

To Daydreamer:

Let me review my premises from my earlier posts for you:

* That religious people can be scientific

* I told IntenSity that I felt he was “lumping "all" Christians into the same category as the fundamentalists! “

-- i.e. It is fundamentalists who follow a LITERAL interpretation of biblical verses and follow the Platonic view that scientific observation is not a valid measure of the natural world.

-- I think a Christian can follow the scientific outlook for observing the NATURAL world, while maintaining a "hope" for a SUPERNATURAL world (ie a world "beyond" that gives them hope for life after death.) Obviously these Christian are not fundamentalists!

* I said to IntenSity, “Even if I accept your statistics of 10% of important scientists being religious -- this is enough for me” (that Christians can hold the scientific view too.)

From this you conclude (?)

* I'm not aware that there are obnoxious fundamentalists. (You give lots of examples. I already know them all.)

* I don’t think highly of James Randi, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins.

Either:

(1) You are not carefully reading my posts to see that IntenSity and I were ONLY speaking from the context of whether Christians can be good scientists too

Or,

(2) You have decided to purposely distort/twist my posts to serve some ideological need on your part:

James Randi and Carl Sagan have been (along with Isaac Asimov who is like Sagan also deceased) some of my main heroes. I have attended many Skeptics meetings in California and personally seen James Randi. It was I who stood up at one of those meetings to challenge some of the theists present (who were stating that the Bible was the source of “all” morality”:

"Why then." I asked, "are important commandments missing such as prohibitions against slavery, torture, and pollution?" -- "This is important because the movements to humanely outlaw slavery and torture were generally opposed by religious fundamentalists?" Their apology: "One can’t have a commandment for EVERY problem." My protests that these were MAJOR omissions looking back historically at the pain and destruction they caused-- were met with silence!

Richard Dawkins is brilliant, but a little too arrogant and intolerant of other points of view for my liking. I favor Steven Jay Gould (another hero of mine.)

=============================================
What this means is that in a discussion I don't decide an issued based on the ideology (theist vs atheist) of the participants -- but instead based on the merits of the arguments! I strive for the truth first and foremost!

Sojourner

[ April 27, 2002: Message edited by: Sojourner553 ]

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Sojourner553 ]</p>

lpetrich

What "political reasons" were those?

However, at the time, the Church's view was that it was OK to present heliocentrism, as long as it was presented as "only a theory" without any special claim to truth. Sort of like the way that some creationists want evolution to be presented.

Galileo had complied with the letter of that view in a book featuring a dialogue between a heliocentrist and a geocentrist, but not with the spirit -- he made the geocentrist look stupid. And the Pope became convinced that he was being made fun of, in the way that Galileo had made fun of numerous others for finding fault with him and his discoveries. So the Pope had had a thin skin.

And Protestant churchmen fulminated against heliocentrism more loudly than Catholic ones; consider Luther and Calvin.

So what if that is the case? Does that justify persecuting him?

And one almost gets the impression from Bede that the Vatican had commissioned Copernicus and Galileo to study the motions of the planets, and that only some unnamed Evil People had made Copernicus afraid to publish and Galileo recant.

Isaac Newton was a nominal Anglican, but he kept his views to himself, because they were considered heretical -- he believed in the Arian heresy that Jesus Christ was subordinate to God the Father, and not coequal. I wonder if Bede is willing to adopt that view because Isaac Newton had held it.

Newton also wrote great volumes about the end-of-the-world prophecies in Daniel and Revelation, which was an absolutely pointless exercise.

However, the more fundamentalist-minded considered Newtonianism to be atheism because God doesn't really do very much in it -- and more likely because it was very mechanistic, presenting the Universe as being like a giant clock.

However, creationists have tried to outlaw the teaching of evolution in decades past, and they have directed extreme amounts of venom at evolutionary biologists.

As to the reception of Darwin's views, one has to distinguish between evolution and natural selection. Evolution was quickly accepted, because Darwin had made such a strong case, but natural selection was not widely accepted as the main mechanism of evolution for nearly a century, until the mid-20th-cy. "Modern Synthesis".

And <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/andrew_white/Andrew_White.html" target="_blank">Andrew Dickson White's magnum opus</a> might be fun for Bede to read. I especially like the chapter on lightning; ringing church bells had been thought a very good lightning repellent, but guess what happened to the bell-ringers? And was Ben Franklin's lightning rod welcomed with open arms by the various Church authorities? Was research into it commissioned by the Pennsylvania branch of the Anglican Church at the time?

The Big Bang proves nothing of the sort; the Universe we know could be some bubble in some super-Universe.

lpetrich

That's a totally hokey viewpoint. If prayers are reliably answered, then that answering will show up in statistical tests.

And if "only the faithless look for signs", then that implies something like Mark Twain's remark that faith is when you believe something when you know it isn't true.

As to "tempting God", so what? Will Mr. G. strike us with lightning? Since he (she? it?) is unwilling to strike with lightning those who make stupid statements about him, why would asking for proof be any different?

lpetrich

Tell us why those views are supposed to be much more absurd than what you consider true Christianity.

I think that New Ageism is a sort of loose, formless religion, and as religions go, is it really much more absurd than our society's respectable ones?

And I don't see the great absurdity in extraterrestrial visits or extraterrestrial seeding or engineering of Earth life.

Bill

On the other hand, the "Cyclic Universe" theory has re-surfaced:

• <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/space/04/26/cosmos.cycle.reut/index.html" target="_blank">CNN News Article</a>
• <a href="http://feynman.princeton.edu/~steinh/" target="_blank">Prof. Steinhardt's Home Page</a> (with lots of links to papers, etc.)
• <a href="http://feynman.princeton.edu/~steinh/dm6.pdf" target="_blank">Prof. Steinhardt's Layman's Introduction</a> for his new Cyclical Universe Theory

Of course, the Cyclical Universe Theory is now anathema to the Christians since they've embraced the "Big Bang" as an act of "God's creation."

== Bill

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Bill ]</p>

Daydreamer

My guess is that most will either move away from the idea that god created the universe, or slingshot into the creationist camp.

Vorkosigan

It's unproven by empirical evidence, so creationists and others who don't buy it can ignore it with a clean conscience.

Vorkosigan

Coragyps

Most of the creationists I argue with have no problem ignoring things that are proven by empirical evidence.

edited 'cause I need to learn to type - C

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Coragyps ]</p>

Sojourner553

To Bill:
Excellent citation! I have enjoyed all your posts!

To Ipetrich re: Martin Gardner:

I agree with you Martin Gardner has a hokey viewpoint to justify his deism. But you leave out that at OTHER times, he has admitted the proofs for nontheism are intellectually stronger than the proofs for theism. He still "chooses" to maintain his belief in a deity for emotional reasons.

Martin Gardner has been a leader of the skeptics movement and written wonderful pieces in both the sciences and also critical works on self-proclaimed faithhealers and miracle workers. He has been a major contributor to FREE INQUIRY, a secular humanist magazine.

My point is that his views have not affected him being a scientist, even though you don't "like" that he refuses to be driven by 100% by his logic. For him, maybe 99% is ok. That might be higher than (at least) some atheists overall...


================================================
As to Ipetrich and IntenSity and Daydreamer:

I have a hard time following if your real premise is:

(1) Christians can't make good scientists (ie because they are all irrational)

or,

(2) all atheists are rational

or

(3) both

********************************
What a simple world it would be if all atheists are "ratinal" and all theists are "irrational".

Sorry guys, a "scientific" examination of the world around us shows the world is comprised of shades of gray -- not black or white.

(I feel I am repeating myself once again. Sigh!)

Let's focus on communist Russia to "test" hypothesis number #2. Remember this was a regime run by atheists! The problem was they were also FUNDAMENTALIST atheists. Do you think this made a difference in their rational outlooks towards science?

A little history (obviously no one reads my links so I'll cut and paste the relevant parts):
____________________________________________

"Although Marxist communists professed to being atheists -- they were required to believe in a creed that believed some invisible force was moving civilization towards a progressive path over time. Thus, Marxist communists were, in effect, REPLACING the divine "God" of theology with a veneration and blind faith in the Party's leadership and direction.

Marxist dogmatists replaced science with pseudo-science. Marx proclaimed his new methods as "scientific socialism", but this term had as much similarity to science as does the organization "Christian Science" and "Creation science". True, Marx talked in general terms, about the use of the "scientific method"--Still his was bounded (in his mind) by the Hegelian concept that all of history moves in accordance with the law of dialectic--thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. As Marx believed that these laws of history were moral "truths"-- he held that any questioning of these assumptions was tantamount to "heresy".

It is probably no coincidence that communism came to embrace mysticism over science. Russian communists generously funded ESP, clairvoyance and other endeavors considered to be of questionable scientific value by most scientists in the West. They also demolished much of their practical sciences and mathematics-- most noticeably in the area of genetics-- because of its obvious conflict with Marxist dogma. Artists and writers were likewise persecuted and
imprisoned, if they deviated from the "official" Party line."

...

[Perhaps this was best seen in agirculture where] Russia embarked on a disastrous agricultural policy, that arose from communist ideology which had interpreted Darwinian genetics as an enemy of the Soviet people. Instead, Soviet bureaucrats determined that Larmarck's views on biology were more closely allied to communist ideology.

...

Lysenko

In place of geneticists, the communists appointed Trofim Lysenko, a former peasant and plant breeder, to run their agriculture program. Lysenko was a powerful speaker, and savagely attacked genetics as decadent capitalistic science. According to Lysenko, genes simply do not exist! Instead, it is the environmental conditions which "shatters" one's heredity. That is, if a plant is transplanted into a new environment that produces desirable changes, then this characteristic is passed onto later generations. (This view was obviously in line with communist ideology that held that the communist revolution would create a new environment for workers that would, over the generations, evolve into a workman's paradise.)

One of the most important methods of genetics is the use of statistics to evaluate the outcome of plant breeding experiments to develop improved strains of wheat, etc. However Lysenko refused to utilize this most basic scientific tool, because he did not believe that "chance" played any role in developing new strains.

The scientific community in the West almost unanimously condemned what was going on in Russia. According to H. J. Muller (a Nobel Prize winner who worked at the Institute of Genetics in Moscow from 1933-37 and personally knew Lysenko and the discredited Russian scientists), "Lysenko's writings
along theoretical lines are the merest drivel. He obviously fails to comprehend either what a controlled experiment is or the established
principles of genetics taught in any elementary course in the subject." (Martin Gardner, FADS AND FALLACIES IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE , P 146)

Lysenko's dominance in Soviet genetics and biology lasted over twenty five years. By 1965 it was again acceptable for universities to conduct
research on genetics, and write textbooks on the subject. However, even after Lysenko's genetics were thoroughly discredited their appeal to Soviet
communist ideology was still strong. For example, Professor Lobashov (1967) wrote how the capitalists bourgeoisie attempted to use genetics to justify the exploitation of one class by another, antagonism between different
nations, and creation of the racialist theories."

source:
<a href="http://mac-2001.com/philo/crit/COMMUNIS.TXT" target="_blank">http://mac-2001.com/philo/crit/COMMUNIS.TXT</a>


__________________________________________

Summary: Not all atheists are alike! I am proposing the RADICAL concept that fundamentalist theists are not so unlike their fundamentalist atheist counterparts. In their effort to create a "perfect" society, they both kill millions of innocent people and initiate dark ages within their societies.

[ April 28, 2002: Message edited by: Sojourner553 ]</p>