Why do so many scientists and atheists seem so furious and intolerant of religion playing any role in people’s lives?

As Nigel Depledge states, most people do not object to religious people being religious.

Here in the US it is written into the Constitution that the government has no role in religion. There are a lot of people, who do not understand that along with this, religion has no role in government. You may look in your Bible/Koran/Torah/Dianetics/. . . and see what it says about issues that you are voting on, and vote as that Book tells you to, but you do not get to use the law to begin a domino effect of religious rules. Of course, none of the people trying to do this ever expect that any other religion would be passing laws that they do not like. That is exactly why the Constitution was written the way it was. Some people did anticipate this. It is as much to protect the religious as it is to protect the rest of the citizens.

The problem is that the Creationists – we’re not even talking a lot of the religious, but certain particular sects, that choose to interpret their religion in a specific way. No problem with that, but they feel the need to force their unscientific beliefs on others. That is wrong.

You complain that science cannot explain love and religion and other things. So what? How many scientists are demanding to come into your church to force their views on you?

On the other hand, the Creationists, who have no clue about science, are demanding to come into the science classroom to force their religion on public school students.

As you mentioned, religion and science do not have much in common.

You keep your religion out of the science classroom and you will realize that scientists have no interest in coming to preach science in your church.

There is no scientific evidence supporting Creationism. There are just a lot of Creationists demonstrating ignorance of science. If you want to bring religion into a discussion of science, expect to be ignored. Science does not care what you want to believe. Science is not a belief.

Science is just a method of finding out the truth.

Creationism is not the truth.

If you want to believe in Creationism, that is your right.

If you want to teach Creationism in science classrooms, then if you are in America, I will oppose your attempts to destroy the Constitution of the US. Too many people have died to defend the Constitution. Yet, you anti-Americans continue to attack it. If you want to live in a theocracy, there are plenty to choose from. Keep your jihad out of American classrooms.

I know what people have said & how they act, I know what I feel when I ask the question “is there a God” and something in my heart says “yes.”

OK, so please may I borrow your heart? because I need an arbiter of truth in an experiment I’m conducting.

Oh, wait … how, exactly, did your heart communicate with your conscious mind?

And, tell us, how are you able to distinguish that “yes” feeling from an hallucination?

Am I sure? No, I’m not.

Oh, right, so the foregoing is irrelevant, then.

I don’t claim any certainty here and I guess its something that everyone needs to think about and decide for themselves.

Well, yeah, but a lot of kids aren’t given that choice, because they are “protected” from anything that might prompt them to think.

But to dismiss out of hand what other people say and think and experience when it clearly matters to them (and others) just because it doesn’t fit an ideal idea of some scientific experiment or fails to be calculated using the digits of pi and the square root of 42 or whatever sounds pretty silly too!

Why? Since when has popular opinion defined how the physical world works?

Because God can’t be confined to a lab or spotted through a telescope or electron microscope or whatever doesn’t necessarily mean He doesn’t exist.

But it does mean that we have no reason to assume a god exists. Therefore, assuming the existence of a god violates parsimony and is thus irrational.

There’s no formula or mathematical calculation for love, for hope, for music yet those things all exist.

Actually, people have written computer programmes that compose music, so that one at least can be reduced to mathematics.

As for love or hope, there are a lot of clever people investigating emotions and how they work and so on. We may one day be able to write down a formula for love.

You are assuming that, because such a thing is not known now, it can never be known. That’s a common creationist mistake.

Science doesn’t try and pretend love, hope or music aren’t real even though they are areas outside of science – so why does it do so with religion?

Simple – it doesn’t. IIUC, scientific studies have been conducted on religions or religious thought. From the perspective of anthropology or psychology. Science does not ignore religion – but we do know that religion offers no information that is not better obtained by another means.

Why do so many scientists and atheists seem so furious and intolerant of religion playing any role in people’s lives?

Again, you have this backwards. Almost all scientists (and most atheists who aren’t scientists) don’t care one way or another what role religion plays in others’ lives. However, when creationists start to make claims about the physical world and about science and scientists, those claims will be assessed with the same rigour that scientists assess other claims.

And, guess what? Pretty much everything that the creationists claim that science has got wrong is a lie, or a misunderstanding.

Why do they feel they need to destroy or at least exclude religious faith from everything when it helps and is so important to so many?

They don’t. And, I daresay that, if you tried to support this statement with some actual evidence (instead of simply assuming you are correct), you would agree with me. Scientists don’t do this.

There are one or two scientists who are also prominent atheists who will talk about atheism and science in the same paragraph, but that does not allow you to generalise amongst all scientists.

Finally, religiou faith has no place in science because it gets in the way of understanding. By forcing you to think along specific lines, it limits your options, and it may blind you to what the evidence is telling you.

As a general rule of thumb, I think the people on the far fringes of every issue are most often wrong with the truth usually somewhere in between towards the moderate centre.

There is no “moderate center” on the question of whether something exists or not. Either it does, or it doesn’t.

Is that really so? I’m know that’s the idea of it but I’m not so sure that’s true in practice.

Out of curiosity, how many scientists do you know? How many scientific conferences have you attended? Why should we think you have even the slightest clue how science is done in practice?

Science is conducted by fallible human beings and every scientist comes in with their own set of preconceptions, their own personal views and assumptions. I think that’s unavoidable. There is a human factor here and while the model and philosophy stated by you there is how its meant to be, I don’t think that’s *necessarily* how science really is conducted in the actual world as opposed to the textbook ideal. I could be wrong but that’s how I see it.

Once again, how much science have you actually seen? Yes, scientists as individuals may have biases, that is why science always has to be reproduced by other people with different biases.

Scientists are after all educated in certain ways and to think in a certain mindset. Scientific curiosity is restricted and channelled by pre-existing external factors like available funding, like scientific peer pressure and colleagues opinions, like what can and can’t be published in a particular journal which will focus and twist things a particular way and do some sort of censoring regarding what can be said and what that’s based on. Scientists can’t really just follow their own curiousity and own instincts or publish in their own way or even really look at whether their own education is too, well narrowly focused and could be excluding things that aren’t amenable to plotting on a graph or mathematical formula.

Utter baloney. Everything you said in this paragraph is flat-out wrong. You obviously don’t know anything about how science is done in practice, you just listened to the anti-science propaganda of the creationists and accepted it at face value.

For example, scientists can for examples look at hormones and pheromones and whatver and physical reactions to love yet this may not tell you much about what love is or how it feels from the inside. It is limited to finding formula and calculations, analysing fossils and stars and all these awesome – and useful – things. However, science can’t say why we love this person or that one, explain emotions like awe or sadness, it can’t tell us what our dogs dream or how our cats perceive the world around them or why a poem or song affects us so strongly.

Actually, scientists are making a lot of progress in all of these fronts and there is no reason whatsoever to think we won’t be able to answer all of these questions.

In short, I think science does have its blind spots and limitations and I wish more scientists would sometimes be more humble and less arrogant and esp. less dismissive of other non-scientific truths or methods of understanding.

What non-scientific truths are those? What other methods of understanding are those? Religion? As I already pointed out, but you completely ignored, religion is useless for finding out what is true or not. Different people get completely different, mutually-exclusive answers to the same questions. I challenge you to give me one “truth” that comes from religion, cannot be determined by any other source, and is agreed upon by all religions. I can give you thousands of such things from science.

Depends who the eye-witnesses are and what condition they were at the time but, yes, why not? Eyewitness testimony can be used convincingly in court cases – why should science disrespect personal eye-witnessing (is that a word?) so much? Most astronomers accept visual eyewitness accounts when it comes to, for example meteors and comets, sketches of what we see of different nebulae and lunar features and so on and some of these eg. TLP, “stones falling from the sky” have proven accurate when scientists at the time doubted them.

No, eyewitness testimony is not sufficient in court. You need at least some physical evidence, for instance that a crime had actually occurred. And when all of the supposed eyewitnesses claim they saw something completely different, I guarantee you the accused is going to go free.

Just suppose, ask yourself please: What if the ID-Creationist people *aren’t* lying? What if they’re telling what they think is the truth based on how they see the evidence? Is it not possible that they may have a case after all? (I’m not necessarily saying that they do, just asking the what if question for you to consider.)

They have been caught blatantly lying on numerous occasions. Not just about the intepretation of scientific facts, but claiming people said things they did not say, saying that people didn’t say things that they are on tape saying them, cherry-picking data, ignoring corrections, blatantly misrepresenting data. The list goes on and on. You simply have not done your research if you think this is a matter of honest disagreement on interpretation of facts.

Is every detail you say accurate either? Is it not possible that you can learn something from them – look at their interpretations seriously and admit: “yeah, well we may not agree exactly but they could have some small point there or the perspective here isn’t how we do things but there’s some validity to it anyway?”

We did that a long time ago. Their arguments have been around for 200 years, they have nothing new. We’ve looked at the evidence they claim supports them, we look at their arguments. We look for anything that might have even the slighest bit of validity. It doesn’t exist. You are assuming we are just dismissing them out of hand without actually looking at what they are saying. That is not the case. We have looked, we have looked very carefully. There is nothing there.

As someone pointed out earlier, the people who originally proved the world was old were all young-earth creationists themselves. They were looking at it from that bias, but as the evidence accumulated it became obvious that this perspective was wrong, so they changed their minds.

Do they really? Out of curiosity – how sure are you that that’s what they’re saying? Do you know this first hand through seing what they say directly or only second hand through hearing others opposed to them saying that’s what they’re saying?

No, a lot of us have read their original material. They have no doubts. In fact many creationist organizations require that its members sign statements explicitly saying they have no doubts, and that they will reject any evidence that contradict their beliefs. You, once again, have shown you have not done much research on this matter.

But biologists do seem to keep stressing how certain they are that Darwin was right and to note one famous example Richard Dawkins’ is vehemently, intolerantly adamant that there is no God and won’t admit any doubt in the matter at all.

No, every biologist on the planet knows that Darwin was wrong about a lot of things. He had some good ideas, and some thing he said have been overwhelmingly supported by the evidence, but a lot of other stuff he said was flat-out wrong. You are once again buying the creationist propaganda, that we are unquestioningly devoted to Darwin’s idea. We aren’t. Evolution has progressed enormously in the last 150 years and there is huge amounts we now know that Darwin could not have even dreamed up.

What if, just hypothetically, the “fundamentalists” as you call them stumbled upon some clear and real bit of evidence contradicting Darwinian evolution? Would they scientists really look at their evidence? Would they assess it fairly? If a breakthrough happened that disproved the theory of evolution would the scientists admit they were wrong and the creationists right? I can’t see that happening to be honest with you!

Of course it would. It would take some convincing, there is a massive amount of evidence supporting evolution so the amount of evidence overturning would have to be massive as well, but it would certainly happen. Actually, it has happened. Several times in fact. There has been at least 3 major revolutions in evolution since Darwin’s time. They still kept the core natural selection mechanism, but additional, substantial parts were added, refined, and/or expanded. As I said, the modern theory of evolution is substantially different than Darwin’s, and Darwin’s big idea, natural selection, is just one of a number of known evolutionary mechanisms.

I may, of course, be wrong but, personally I kind of like the idea that there may be some exchange of knowledge or insight between these two areas. That each can learn or gain something from the other.

I agree that would be great. But first religion would need to show some capacity to tell us stuff that is true and can’t be found out by other means. So far, it has not demonstrated an ability to do that. Everything it tells us can either be determined by other means or is not consistent amongst religions and therefore is unreliable.

Science is conducted by fallible human beings and every scientist comes in with their own set of preconceptions, their own personal views and assumptions. I think that’s unavoidable. There is a human factor here and while the model and philosophy stated by you there is how its meant to be, I don’t think that’s *necessarily* how science really is conducted in the actual world as opposed to the textbook ideal. I could be wrong but that’s how I see it.

I’ll give you the fact that science is conducted by humans. And the beauty of science is that it is held up to the scrutiny of other scientists. In effect it is self correcting, as through the process of peer review the bad science gets weeded out. Any bias or preconceptions or if you will fraud will be eventually be discovered through this process. Scientists are required to cite evidence and how they came about that evidence, ie what observations they used or experiments they conducted as part of the process so that other scientists can also examine the evidence to see if their conclusions from the evidence is valid. If experimental results can’t be repeated or there is something wrong in their reasoning then they get called on it.

Scientists are after all educated in certain ways and to think in a certain mindset. Scientific curiosity is restricted and channelled by pre-existing external factors like available funding, like scientific peer pressure and colleagues opinions, like what can and can’t be published in a particular journal which will focus and twist things a particular way and do some sort of censoring regarding what can be said and what that’s based on. Scientists can’t really just follow their own curiousity and own instincts or publish in their own way or even really look at whether their own education is too, well narrowly focused and could be excluding things that aren’t amenable to plotting on a graph or mathematical formula.

Science is a well defined framework that has great explanatory power. If you fall outside this basic framework then it’s not science. There are no biases here if you follow the scientific framework, go through the process of peer review then you will get published. I think you have been reading too much ID propaganda, here’s a heads up, they are lying to you. There is no conspiracy here within the scientific community, time and time again the ID people are asked to do the work, provide some evidence for their assertions, come up with a testable hypothesis, you know do the actual science, and what do you think we get back in return…. cricket chirps. Anyone is free to follow their own instincts and curiosity, we just ask that they adhere to the scientific framework so that their conclusions can be verified.

There’s no formula or mathematical calculation for love, for hope, for music yet those things all exist

False dichotomy, just because science can’t fully understand these things yet, btw they are working on it and making progress, doesn’t give any more weight to the existence of a creator.

What if the ID-Creationist people *aren’t* lying? What if they’re telling what they think is the truth based on how they see the evidence? Is it not possible that they may have a case after all

But they are, pure and simple, if they had a case they would do the science instead of appealing to the court of popular opinion.

I think a better approach from the scentists would be to admit there are some things beyond science and maybe reconsider how they approach these things and areas

Again that’s not science. We don’t presuppose anything, remember. There is no evidence that we should make this assumption. It might very well turnout to be true, but to accept the status quo is inherently a religious trait.

Eyewitness testimony can be used convincingly in court cases

It’s been shown time and time again that eyewitness accounts are not reliable, even in a court of law. A conviction would require other evidence to back up the eyewitness account. No one is going to be convicted solely on an eyewitness account.

Could the different ways of seeing reality – Creationist and Evolutionist (for want of a better word) – be like, say, how a cartoon differs from a photo differs from an oil painting but each is beautiful and valid in its own way

No, religion is not reality based, faith has no basis in reality which is the cornerstone of religion.

Is every detail you say accurate either? Is it not possible that you can learn something from them – look at their interpretations seriously and admit: “yeah, well we may not agree exactly but they could have some small point there or the perspective here isn’t how we do things but there’s some validity to it anyway

Sure, if they would only just DO THE SCIENCE!

For a “ridiculous” idea the notion of a personal God sure has a lot of believers! If its such a “ridiculous” notion and so opposed by all the evidence then why do so many intelligent, compassionate and reasonable people believe in it? There are even a number of people – famously C.S. Lewis and Professor Anthony Flew

Appeal to authority doesn’t make my point any less valid. Like you said people are prone to make mistakes, Flew was a deist, and was in mental decline at the end of his life.

I think calling the notion of a personal God and people having a personal relationship with Jesus “ridiculous” is hyperbole on your part and offensive and alienating hyperbole at that

OK, how is deluded for you then. Oh and your concern is noted.

I think religion and science both have a role to play in, well everything, and trying to exclude one or the other from life and/our society is ubalanced and harmful

That’s not what I said. I said the science and religion are incompatible. Religion by it’s very nature requires blind faith, science requires evidence, faith is at odds with evidence, you see where I’m going…. This of course doesn’t mean that you can’t be a good scientist and religious at the same time, it called compartmentalization.

You keep your religion out of my science and everything will just be fine. But don’t ask me to treat creationism (ID) in a scientific way, until they do the science it cannot be treated as science.
Religion does play a role in a lot of people’s lives whether for the bad or good, I’m not denying that, I will disagree with you about it being a requirement for a civil society though, I don’t see how bronze age thinking can be beneficial at this point in time. Our governmental and legal systems are doing a fairly good job of it.

For example, scientists can for examples look at hormones and pheromones and whatver and physical reactions to love yet this may not tell you much about what love is or how it feels from the inside. It is limited to finding formula and calculations, analysing fossils and stars and all these awesome – and useful – things. However, science can’t say why we love this person or that one, explain emotions like awe or sadness, it can’t tell us what our dogs dream or how our cats perceive the world around them or why a poem or song affects us so strongly.

You missed out a really important word from every sentence in this paragraph: “yet”. Who knows what science may one day be able to tell us?

To presume there are things we will never understand is to give up trying to understand them.

In short, I think science does have its blind spots and limitations and I wish more scientists would sometimes be more humble and less arrogant and esp. less dismissive of other non-scientific truths or methods of understanding.

OK, that’s a good one.

Please can you explain – in detail – what a “non-scientific truth” may be? Pay particular attention, please, to how these “truths” may be demonstrated to be true.

Also, since science is the process of understanding the physical world, what other methods of understanding are there?

If you refer to personal human experience, all I can say there is that science is not yet able to elucidate this. But it may one day be possible. After all, neuroscience and psychology are both moving forwards, increasing our collective understanding of the brain and how it works.

But then, who really can claim to understand love?