re: #184 CuriousLurker

Okay, this one is for the atheists:

In passing I saw a tweet that had a quote which I looked up and found was from a book by named The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by a guy named Michael Shermer. I can’t even remember what the quote was now, but I looked up the author and it seems he’s an atheist.

On his website, which I ended up at via Wikipedia, he says the following (emphasis mine):

So I went back to his Wiki page and saw that a woman named Eugenie Scott, Director of the National Center for Science Education Director, had emphatically disagreed with him because the existence or non-existence of God isn’t testable and science is based on empirical evidence, being able to test things, and is limited to the natural world—i.e. science, scientific data, doesn’t compel any particular theological or philosophical belief.

At around the 42:00 mark she leads up to talking about Shermer (and Dawkins, et al.), and she actually mentions him beginning around 43:00:

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I went around looking for the definition of science/scientific methodology, and she appears to be 100% correct. So basically, I guess my point is that it seems there are some individual scientists who don’t think God exists, and there are skeptics/atheists who—based on scientific evidence (or rather the lack of it)—don’t think God exists because his existence is unnecessary to explain the natural world, but there’s nothing in science that says any such thing because religious belief and/or philosophy is not what science is about.

I’m not trying to pick a fight with you guys, I’m just saying that she makes sense, perfect sense. What she’s saying in the video is what I’ve (inelegantly) tried to express many times here—that science & religion have completely different methodologies & purposes and it therefore strikes me as rather absurd to try to prove or disprove one using (the methodology of) the other.

I’m really, really glad I found someone who can clearly articulate what I knew on a gut level had to be correct.

I haven’t watched all 87 minutes of her talk yet, but I’m very much looking forward to doing so soon.

That is all.

An atheist is as radical as any other fundamentalist. It takes a tremendous amount of faith to keep all those balls up in the air.

As an agnostic/Deist, I have no understanding of either group. Too damn much work.

Is there a God? Maybe yes, maybe no, but I see no evidence of an active God in our world. Unless he or she or it is, on the whole, a complete asshole.