As Steve LaBonne pointed out: what exactly is so “humble” about making stuff up with your head and treating it as fact?

“Science proceeds from the known, starting with the self – cogito…ergo sum!”

That’s Descartes, not science.

As I said already, science is application of the scientific method. Do you have a problem with understanding that simple sentence? Read up on the scientific method, read up on the idea of “falsifiability”, and maybe come back when you actually have something useful to say.

You can imagine all you like, but unless you can show that the fruits of your “imagination” have something to do with this reality, you’re just engaging in fact-free rantage.

“Can you see how your adamant polarities divide that in me? How the prominence of those polarities in the world could be a real concern?”

No, I don’t why your “imagination” is so important that we must treat it as fact.

Several points.

1.) Religion is one area of discussion where criticism has been effectively censured. If this were not the case we wouldn’t be discussing “evangelical atheists” just because a few popular books have been written. Anyone remember the Mohammed cartoon protests? Or the periodic religiously motivated book banning attempts that happen in the US? Why should these belief systems that make frankly bizarre assertions be entitled to any sort of special deference?
While it is ok to criticise political beliefs or someones style of dress, their religious beliefs are somehow sancrosanct no matter how repellent or damaging to other members of society. I believe it is in fact time for this to change.

2.) 9-11, London and Madrid not to mention the shooting of abortion doctors in the US and a continuous pressure on politicians to introduce religiously based laws. IE a constitutional amendment to ban homosexual partnerships in the US. Banning stem cell research. Banning abortion. Demanding enclaves of Sharia Law etc. etc.
In the UK where “faith” schools are publicly funded we now have Islamic ones as well as R/C, Anglican and at least one creationist one. The most recent gem is that we’re going to publicly fund training Imams. When the religious feel free to put their hand in my pocket and extract cash in order to promulgate their beliefs, I believe it is time to call into question why we are funding this rubbish. For that matter why should they be getting tax relief?

3.) I can honestly say I have never had an “evangelical atheist” turn up at my door. I do however get Mormons and Jehovas witnesses regularly. As well as the Church of Scotland twice a year. I am somehow expected to be civil to them although I rather doubt if I turned up at their house on a Saturday asking to hold a Satanic worship service (or even listen to an atheist diatribe) they would be so polite.

The current debate (‘contesting religion’) is current. It’s being waged in current terms and the current set of fears and worries have bearing. So too does recent history. That the pre-Socratics or whomever contested the validity of the religion of the day has little, if any, bearing on that. It’s not a question of whether critical thinking or blood-letting of animals is more efficacious – that’s been answered, and you’ll be happy to know the critical thinkers won. People have moved on since then, all the fundamentalists in American notwithstanding. What’s at stake is the source for the determination of the values of the greater whole, and for the reasons I clumsily outlined above, the thinking religious are mightily concerned about that, and for seeming good reason. Maybe, I’m misunderstanding you, but not wanting to address that primary driver of the debate, and tease out its components is both dumb and counter-productive.

Also, to position the debate as between some reified ‘scientific method’ free of the taint of intellectual sin, and religious buffoonery, priestcraft and ancestor worship, as is usually the case, is intellectually dishonest and basically ensures little further role for the person doing that, whether they are on the side of the angels or the amoeba..

You don’t need to accept the religious world-view, in order to accept that the values that it pays lip-service to, and which people try, in part, to organise their lives in terms of, are valid and important. And having accepted that, provisionally, it might be worth looking at the need for the posited alternative to ‘religion’ to have a toolkit for handling those values. But this requires that you can dissect the ideas of religion and see in it the creation of cosmologies, the ascription of causes, and the elaboration of ethical behaviors, and distinguish and weight these sets accordingly. Nuance and delicacy is everything, which is something that many in both theological and scientific camps have taken on board. Their fans, patrons and supporters, seems not so much.

Given that the manner of your discourse is so hostile, that’s pretty much the last I’ll have to say here. You can read that as a microcosm of the greater debate, if you like.

Except that that’s not so clear, bi. Science is often guys in white coats doing arcane stuff for big organizations because that’s where the money comes from. And next to science stands fans of science, often guys in suspenders cheering the corporate plan on, without any accurate knowledge of what the plan is, or what the scientists do.

There’s too little clarity in this thread. What is generally being opposed to the (stereotypically simplified) forces-of-religion is science-as-philosophical-standpoint. Not science as she is practiced, which (courtesy of the economic annexation of the various sciences), is better described as technology. Let’s call the latter science(1). Science-as-scientific-method is merely a way of thinking, and therefore falls into the science-as-philosophy camp. Which is fine and well and good. Let’s call that science(2).

What happens in argument though, is that in defense of science(2), patrons and fans tend to default to the accomplishments of science(1) and thereby get tarred with the abuses that pervade science(1) as it is now practiced.

Then there’s the rest of the argument – there’s actually no serious doubt that science(2), also often called empiricism, the scientific method, critical thinking and so on, is the smartest way humans have discovered to live in the world, and specifically to live with the world as material substance. It’s borne out again and again by the accurate prediction of simple future events, which is properly the holy grail of living things.

What religious people object to is the outcomes of science(1), where those are clearly not beneficial. Since science(1) is an extension of corporate research, mostly, its outcomes are applied as technology and often applied in a vacuum of knowledge about consequences. Normal profiteering by the organs of the modern economy doesn’t seem to have required assessment of consequence and so when science(2) becomes science(1) there’s a loss of signal. Thus we have highly sophisticated shipping and freight (a consequence of science(2)) that dumps massive amounts of waste in the oceans, creates noise pollution that disrupts critical activity for sonar-using animals and so on.

Essentially, science(2) serves science(1) and the values of science(1) or ‘applied sciences’, do not derive from science-as-philosophy, but are social, corporate and economic and partake of all the problems of those domains.

You can argue all you like about the wonders of science-as-philosophy, and the vast and towering moral high ground it occupies over religious beliefs, but the fact remains that science-as-philosophy is a very personal thing. What people experience is science-as-applied and while science as applied has been extraordinarily beneficial, it has also been devastatingly destructive in application – it the patrons of science-as-handmaiden-of-commerce that have gifted us with global warming, massive ecological destruction and all the rest. Not the religious.

It’s true that these destructive impulses are not part of science(2) – that is, they’re not embedded in the scientific worldview. But they are part of science as it is practiced, and so far science-as-philosophy, which is what people want to oppose religion with, has pretty much been powerless to reign in its own consequences. All of which is grist to the mills of the religious person, who identifies this failure as a failure of values. The patron of the sciences gets irate at this, but has no legitimate response. And the bickering begins.

The fact remains that science-as-philosophy is contesting religion on grounds where it hasn’t developed a comparable set of conclusions. On the level of day-to-day interactions with matter, knowing something about the laws of motion (even if you don’t know you know it) is good and the more sophisticated the knowledge, the better. On the level of deciding whether to trust your brother-in-law, again, after he’s failed you, the laws of motion are useless. Equally useless is game theory. Even worse, if you know he will default again.

There’s no way for the natural sciences to help you make that decision, because one correct answer may be that you must trust him again, and allow him to fail you, again, in order to sustain a relationship built on a recognition and acceptance of another’s flaws, while never speaking them aloud, and which recognition brings value into the lives of both parties and facilitates other gains. You can’t assess that gain, because it’s entirely subjective. But despite being subjective for both parties, it’s mutually recognized and therefore can be acted on. The rules governing that interaction haven’t been formulated by science(1) and have been cravenly ignored (usually in favor of pointing to the successes of technology) by science(2).

The missing questions are questions of value, and unless science-as-philosophy is planning to address these, successfully, religion is going to own them hands down. Because religion exists to provide rule-sets that address these questions in the tiniest detail. Screaming about it won’t change this. For better or for worse, religion addresses these. It may be, as Dawkins claims, that in so doing it leaves a canker in the brain. All the more reason for the fans of science-as-philosophy to get to work, then.

“Science” is not “folks in white lab coats doing arcane stuff for big fat organizations”. “Science” is simply application of the scientific method, period.

Come back after you manage to understand this.

Your personal obsessions, while evidently fascinating to yourself, are exceedingly opaque- not helped any by the masses of disordered verbiage- and appear to have have nothing to do with the subject under discussion. But, thanks for playing.

Asking why some feel the need to stand up for atheism is a bit like asking why they would stand up for science. A materialistic explanation of stuff is what science aspires too, isn’t it? No room in a materialistic explanation for spiritual causes. The guy who lectures in the high school physics class, if he is true to his job, is espousing material explanations. Not sitting quietly and believing but not speaking. The gal who prescribes amoxycillin rather than exorcism is espousing material explanations. Looking at drilling records to locate water, rather than dousing for it, is to espouse material explanations. Telling thirsty people that drilling records are the way to go is evangelizing? So be it.

There surely is a bit of self-assertion or other-denigration going on in proposing that others do what they do for reasons of bile or weakness or fear or anger. Is that why we think scientists do what they do? Fear and bile? Jacob Bronowsky wrote of the beauty of scientific and mathematical ideas, and did so beautifully. Must we reject that possibility for materialism?

I realize this is a bit of a stretch, but arguing for one’s position from evidence, in a way that is internally consistent, just might have a bit of Bronowsky in it. There is no need for bile or hurt to push for reality as one sees it. Dawkins may see danger in religious thinking, but that need not mean every materialist is arguing out of fear or hurt.