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John Prytz (John Prytz)
Regarding Religion vs. Science

*Where the answer is known it's because science knows it. Where science doesn't yet know, religion doesn't know either.

*If someone today claims to actually be divine and be able to do miracles, suddenly all Christians will be demanding extraordinary evidence and scientific proof from them. Yet when it comes to their belief in ancient historical divine beings and their miracles, Christians give it all a free pass, because all claims in an old book are good enough evidence for them.

*Science requires itself to try to falsify their claims and theories and ideas by observation and experiment and mathematics and rational logic in order to determine what is reality. Religions never question their foundations or try to falsify their foundational beliefs.

*Science is the same worldwide but religions tend to be geographical: Christianity in the Americas and Europe and Australia / New Zealand; Islam in the Middle East; Buddhism in Asia. This reinforces the idea that your religious belief system is based on where you are born and raised.

*Science is created by human minds. Religion is the result of a human mind refusing to work.

*Some scientists are indeed religious, but they don't bring religion into their day job and they don't bring their day job with them when they attend their church or other religious ceremonies.

*Religious True Believers don't have to worry about climate change / global warming because 1) God promised no more floods and 2) the End Times are nearly here so global warming isn't an issue.

*Religion gives people an absolute excuse to stop thinking since religion reveals all in black-and-white. Don't question anything since God has already told you all you really need to know. Contrast that to how science and scientists operate.

*Religious folk often try to pass off their religious belief systems as science given their holy book sometimes contains passages relevant to cosmology, geology, and biology. But scientists don't ever try to pass off their science as religion.

*If right-wing fundamentalist Christian True Believers demand that Creationism and Intelligent Design be taught to students in public school science classes, shouldn't these same True Believers be required and forced to teach Darwinian Evolution in their Sunday School classes and in their church services? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

*However, to teach Creationism and Intelligent Design in Biology class would be akin to teaching Alchemy in Chemistry class and Astrology in an Astronomy class.

*Science and scientists have the ability and where-to-all to say "I / we don't know" when they don't know. You're very, very unlikely to get that sort of admission from religion and theist True Believers. And, by the way, when science says "I / we don't know" that doesn't give theist True Believers an automatic license or admission ticket to say "therefore God did it" or "therefore God is responsible".

*Science brings the diversity of people together in a common belief system of how the world works as all Christians, Jews, Muslims, Scientologists, Hindus, Atheists, etc. can all agree on gravity; that the Moon goes around the Earth; that the Earth isn't flat; that table salt is composed of sodium and chlorine, etc. Science brings the diversity of people together with common goals, like international collaborations like the Large Hadron Collider and in various space missions and in medicine and in tackling climate change. Contrast that with religion which does anything but bring the diversity of people together.

*According to 1 Samuel 2: 8, the Earth is standing on pillars (not 'floating' in space), pillars created by God. I'm surprised that these pillars aren't standing in turn on the backs of turtles; and that from there on in it's turtles all the way down.

*If you use the data given to you in 1 Kings 7: 23, you'd calculate Pi as being equal to exactly three - no more and no less. Clearly the writers of 1 Kings failed Mathematics 101 (and God did a very poor job of proof-reading His own holy book).

*If you scroll though the thousands of stories about the extreme Christian, fundamentalist, evangelistic, right-wing religious fanatics on the "Right Wing Watch" website, you'll note some common themes, including all of the 'science' presented in the Bible is literal truth; climate change is just a conspiracy and isn't happening; in any event rising sea levels are of no concern because God will never destroy the Earth with flood waters; natural disasters are just the wrath of God so prayers can stop them; faith-healing and prayer trumps medicine and can even raise the dead; not using fossil fuels is an insult to God since God created them for our use; nuclear power is good too; environmentalists are evil; only eyewitness testimony can determine the age of the Earth; biological evolution is nonsense and creationism makes much more sense; people who believe in evolution should be disqualified from holding political office (that also holds true for gays, atheists, and those who don't oppose abortion); dinosaurs and humans co-existed; and the icing on the cake: what keeps an atom’s nucleus together? Jesus, that's what!

*Priests cannot turn a cracker / wafer into actual flesh, nor wine into blood, just by mumbling some Latin over them! Anyone who believes to the contrary is in serious need of putting their Analyst on danger money.

*Natural causes are a commonplace dime-a-dozen. Supernatural causes are as rare as hens' teeth, even rarer. You won't find even one supernatural cause written up in any academic peer-reviewed journal, unless of course the nature of the journal is one preaching to the faithful.

*Homosexuality is considered unnatural in the Bible but a talking snake and donkey is totally natural, as is the creation of a woman from a rib, a virgin birth and walking on water. Go figure, especially when homosexuality is a naturally occurring feature in the animal kingdom.

*Billions upon billions of years of physical, chemical and biological evolution / natural selection is patently ridiculous. It's just so obvious that life, the Universe and everything had to have been created in just six days.

*No scientific mystery that has ever been solved has had that solution be of the theological kind.

*The good thing about science is that it remains true regardless of whether or not you believe it.

*Another illustration of the double standards that religion adopts is that if science should support their beliefs, then it is a thumb's up and science rules, OK? Of course if that exact same science refutes their beliefs, then it is an absolute thumb's down. For example, if one finds a piece of wood that might have some connection to Noah's Ark and carbon dating dates that wood to the time frame associated with Noah's Ark, well that's a thumb's up. Of course when carbon dating doesn't support a suitable age for the Shroud of Turin, well of course carbon dating is totally unreliable and lacks credibility so it's a thumb's down. Sorry True Believers, you can't have it both ways.