Scientology has about as much to do with science as... as... something that doesn't have anything to do with something else. It's a dangerous religious cult, plain and simple. Science has nothing to do with Scientology.

I'm not suggesting that scientific ideas are invalid, on the contrary, many of those ideas (which I hold true) may lead to the proof, so to say, of a higher being.

God's existence, by its very nature, cannot be disproved. As soon as you come up with a reason why He can't exist, the obvious rebuttal is always "oh, He put that there to test our faith". For example, take dinosaur fossils. Clear proof of the evolutionary process! "Oh no; God put those fossils there to test our faith".

As you can see, it's a catch-all answer. So God's existence is impossible to disprove; belief in God relies entirely on faith.

Scientific theories, on the other hand, are all potentially able to be disproved (by definition). That is, for a theory to be considered scientific, there must be an experiment that we could perform which would demonstrate whether or not the theory holds. That's how science works; we come up with a theory, test it, find all the holes, come up with a better theory that explains the holes, and repeat indefinitely.

Theories based on faith, on the other hand, can never be disproved. So they're fundamentally incompatible with science.

Well science says how the universe started and works.

Religion says how you should live your life.

I don't see a problem

My dear god, there are so many New Atheists on BYOND.

Now, of course you get hardcore Bible thumpers all the time, and that can definitely be annoying. But so can thundering, lumbering New Atheists like JP, and to a whole new degree. They're both just as bad, because they're both fanatical. It's like when you get hardcore communists like Stalin and fascists like Hitler, opposite side of the spectrum but just as bad.

Now here's the thing, since I believe in a higher power I'd like my higher power to be a lot freaking smarter than us. And I'd expect this higher power to be smart enough to set off the big bang and create evolution.


And to answer the question of why someone would be a scientist and believe in god, have you ever heard the phrase "Taking apart the watch just makes you have more respect for the watch maker."


Besides, its comforting for people to be able to hope, and ask for guidance. That's why "There are no atheists in foxholes".

Except in America, that is. But it won't be long 'til all Americans are wiped out anyway, thank God.

If we go, we're taking Europe with us!

Worldweaver is going to use his worldcleaver to kill your worldbeaver if you keep calling him that.

Solbadguy500 wrote:

Well science says how the universe started and works.

Religion says how you should live your life.

I don't see a problem

Religion and science don't necessarily have to be incompatible, provided that religion gives way to science on matters that science is far better equipped to answer (like how did the universe begin, how did life start, how did humans come about). Unfortunately, most religions don't restrict themselves in this way. That's where the conflict occurs. You can't easily be a creationist and a scientist without carrying some serious internal contradictions around with you. The scientific method is simply incompatible with creationism, for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

Creationist scientists do exist, but they have to have a huge blind spot in the area of evolution. Darwinism isn't perfect (remember what I said about continually refining theories?) but at least it's based on reasoning and observation, not just blind faith.

Humans are really, really good at ignoring contradictions in their own belief systems!

I think religion lived as a way of life is fine. There are a lot of good things in Christianity (love thy neighbour, thou shalt not kill, all that stuff) - unfortunately there's a lot of crap that tends to get dragged along with it.

Worldweaver wrote:

Besides, its comforting for people to be able to hope, and ask for guidance. That's why "There are no atheists in foxholes".

Just because it's comfortable to believe something doesn't mean that it's a good idea to believe it. For example, it would be comfortable for me to believe that I am immortal, but if I did believe that I would probably get myself killed pretty quickly.

BTW, there are atheists in foxholes.
http://www.americanhumanist.org/humanism/foxhole.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheists_in_foxholes
http://www.atheistfoxholes.org/about.php

I just dont get how The universe came from nothing, i cant even really explain what i mean really, to hard to put in words. But, its easy to just say God, for everything you cant explain, which is bad.

Okay, so apparently the Socratic Method isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I must've come off as an idiot with the responses and replies I've gotten.

Here's what got me thinking:

Entropy. It's defined as disorder, and our universe, as a whole, tends towards higher entropy or disorder. Every spontaneous reaction that occurs in nature follows the same rules. However, in the universe's urgent rush to become random, pockets of anomalies surface. One of which is so glaring it's been nagging at me for the past week or so. Namely us.

(Now, I'm not pretending to know much of the subject. So if anyone can give me some more information, or point me towards some cool papers or such, it would be greatly appreciated. I love the stuff.)

This lead to a long night reading up on the theory of evolution and the Big Bang Theory. Now it should be stated that I already believed in God, though not necessarily the Christian God (going into that story would take ages), before my intellectual splurge last night.

I began with evolution since it was an obvious topic when concerning both science and religion. I already knew a few oddities of the theory, such as the staggering odds against it and recent discoveries of "fast evolution," but on the whole it made, and still makes, a whole lot of sense to it. We have fossil evidence, for one. And evolution has already been proven on the micro-biological scale. After reading a few articles, I pondered on the origin of the universe, not just living beings.

So thus began my research (if you can call Googling it research) on the Big Bang Theory. I didn't know much about it except that it pretty much states that one small speck of matter blew up to make the universe. After reading up on it, to my knowledge and rudimentary understanding, one infinitely small volume of infinite mass with infinite density and infinite gravity exploded. Quarks, anti-quarks, leptons and anti-leptons were just floating around for a little while. Then whoosh they created protons, neutrons, and electrons. Then few minutes later, Hydrogen and Helium were formed. And such and such. So on and so on.

At this present point in history, there's pretty much a consensus in the majority of the scientific world that the Big Bang Theory is valid (universal expansion and whatnot). But the questions now is why and how? Why did that singularity, essentially equivalent to a black hole, release all that matter? And how the heck did that singularity come into existence anyways?

So that's what led me to this question. Personally, it seems possible for me. I didn't really want to get flamed as an ignorant Christian, but what do my wishes count for over the internet anyways?

(Like I said, so would love more information on the topic. I'm tending to shy away from Wikipedia at the moment.)

GoodDoggyTreat wrote:

And Christian Science is the anti-science.

Yeah - if you lock a scientist and an adherent of Christian Science in the same room together, sooner or later they'll annihilate each other.

BOOM


Airjoe - LOL, took me a moment to get that.

How would you rationalise 1/sqrt(2)? Square the denominators.

So how would you rationalise science and faith? Square the denominators!

At least I think that's what he's saying...