“I can give you a very well supported by evidence and logic argument for why we should aim for complete eradication of religion and I can do that because I have not always been of that opinion, but I have adopted it through going through the aforementioned exercise of applying logic to evidence and have found that it is the inescapable conclusion.”

And why should we believe anything you have to say or trust it? After all, you are just an accidental bag of chemicals and you make decisions based on what the accidental software in your brain determines. You have no free will. You are nothing more than an animal that is motivated by sex, food, and self-preservation. Why should we believe what an evolved monkey has to say? What proof do we have that the chemical processes in your brain are better than the chemical processes in the brain of a person who evolved to believe in God? Neither of you can help yourselves as you are slaves to the chemical processes that occur in your brains.

When a materialist/atheist like yourself makes material claims, I am forced to ask how you know what you are saying is correct? If your mind is nothing more than the result of contingent or determined natural processes, then so are any thoughts about it. This undermines any truth claims that you can make – or anyone for that matter. The problem is that you cannot get outside of your head and look down on everything else objectively and do science. When you enter the game, the game is over. Without an Umpire, without rules, without standards, without truth, and without morals, it’s not a game. It’s chaos.

You have to do science inside your head and your head is subject to the same natural processes that my religious head is subject to. So my question is why is your brain better than mine? After all, there are more religious people out there than atheists. Perhaps survival of the fittest means that religious people will win out over atheist/materialist types and so what? There is no right or wrong in evolution. What is is. There is no goal in evolution. Evolution doesn’t care what happens to any species. How can evolution be right or wrong or one direction be right or wrong? It can’t. You can have opinions about things. There might be a certain direction that you would like to see evolution go, but there is no “should” or “ought” in evolution.

God designed and created this world. That is why there is order, design, and complexity orders of magnitude above what is possible for chance to produce. He made us with brains capable of doing and understanding science because we are made in His image. Laws of logic exist because God is a God of order and truth. Evolution cannot account for the laws of logic that you want to use. In order for you to use these laws, you have to borrow them from the Judeo-Christian worldview. Then you turn around and shoot yourself in the foot by claiming there is no God. The minute you say that, your laws of logic have nothing left to stand on and your whole philosophy crumbles. You become nothing more than a bag of chemicals – basically an “it” without free will. You think, act, reason, etc based on the chemical reactions in your brain. Love is a figment of your imagination – simply the result of the chemical s in your body. What a fulfilling life that sounds like. Oh how I’d love to become an atheist, but alas, I’m stuck being a creationist because of the chemical processes in my own body.

Chris needs to continue to sharpen his argument for a ‘middle road’ — where do you draw the line to invalidate religious teachings which violate scientific reality? Flat Earth? Praying for children rather than seeking medical care?

If you define science as methodology, then you are defining it the same way as I do.

And the incompatibility follows only from the definition of science as methodology, because you can twist the theological interpretation of facts any way you want, but the there is no way to get around the epistemological incompatibility between the methodology of science on one side and faith on the other.

From which it follows that science is unconstitutional because if you successfully teach science as a way of knowing the world, then you are killing religion as an “alternative” way of doing it. And as I have said many times, declaring science unconstitutional would be the best thing that could happen in the whole conflict, because it would reveal the deep anti-intellectualism of this country (and the world as a whole), it would escalate the debate to the level it has to be at, and it would eventually not last long (if it does then there was no hope anyway) and it would lead to some long overdue changes in the constitution.

There might be sound political and diplomatic reasons to aim for the “middle ground”. But that has nothing to do with reaching reasonable and logical conclusions.

I hope that there are not too many science journalists who are ready to compromise on reason and logic for political reasons.

As for conflating humans with methodology, the topic of the post is hardly limited to methodology.

GM, the frequently made claim is that science and religion are incompatible because of some basic antagonism making it impossible to practice reason and to believe at the same time. All I did was to point out that religion is hardly the only form of thought and action that unrealistic claim could be made for.

I’ve known of a number of atheists who gamble, who would scoff at the idea of “luck” if it was articulated, indeed, some of them members of the old CSICOP. Yet anyone with what one would hope was a level of mathematical sophistication you’d expect those folks to have would know that coming out ahead at gambling would only happen by something other than favorable odds. So, where are the condemnations of gambling scientists, who, if they run up big enough debts, might, well, be tempted to cook results or embezzle funds from their labs, etc. Where is the mockery for people who not only profess but clearly practice something that is the antithesis of pure reason in the way that even some very successful scientists with spotless records are when they express religious belief?

And you could als0 ask about other kinds of non-scientific, even anti-scientific ideas. There isn’t anyone who is damaging science more these days than corporate science and scientific ideologues who are Republicans.