/atheism/ - Atheism

>"Most scientists aren't atheists"
>Gives a graph that shows at least 59% of scientists don't believe in a God.

Higher power =/= God. Hence why the distinction was made in the graph itself.

>So we have faggots on /atheism/ claiming that science debunks religion and religion is unscientific.

But it does, or at least many aspects of it. Creation myths: debunked. Miracles: debunked. Demonic possessions: debunked. and so on.

If nothing else, what we now know about the universe and how it works does shed some doubts as to the validity of religion because they got so many things wrong.

And yes, religion is unscientific. It does not follow the scientific method. Saying religion is unscientific is no more controversial than saying philosophy or art is.

>And we are professional scientists,
We are? Cool!

> the majority of whom do believe in God or a higher power.
Yet the minority believe in a God which is what stands in the way of them being atheists.

You can believe in dragons or ghosts or demons or any supernatural bullshit and still be an atheist. The only distinction is in the belief of a God.

>Who is more reliable?
The arguments.

> 'Is science incompatable with religion, let's ask Higgs, Cern researcher and word renowned physicist.
Argument from authority but whatever. Also Higgs is an atheist.

>He said a lot of scientists in his field were religious believers. "I don't happen to be one myself, but maybe that's just more a matter of my family background than that there's any fundamental difficulty about reconciling the two."

Good for him. Others might disagree and probably for the reasons I mentioned earlier. Peter Higgs saying science and religion are compatible doesn't necessarily make it so no more than if Dawkins were to say they're incompatible. Higgs didn't make an argument in the quote you gave but merely stated that he doesn't see a conflict. I could just as easily say I do see a conflict, leave it at that, and it would be just as good an argument.

Maybe next time learn to read graphs.

▶Anonymous (You) 04/03/15 (Fri) 15:21:53 72bdce No.6089
I think belief varies accross the disciplines. Most physicists, astronomers, and especially biologists are Atheists/Agnostic, and the percentage of those who believe in God is in the single digits according to a 1998 survey.

>>6099

>>because now over 15% of the general population is atheist.

>>6090

>and the percentage of those who believe in God is in the single digits according to a 1998 survey.

so do Atheists ever post evidence or citations for their claims or is muh evidence just something you throw at religious claims

anyways here we can look and see that in every single field of science - atheist are the minority

Also we are seeing that Atheism seem to be popular among older scientsts whereas the new generation of scientists (18-34) seem much more likely to be religious.

This teaches us that the relationship between sicence and atheism was never really all that Protestant and is really just the product of a bygone era, and an outmoded way of thinking, much like the people of this board.

Older scientists did their research in a world where sicence and religon were thought to conflict, but as science progresses and as our understanding of the universe and its mysteries grows, we can see the younger generation of scientists becoming more likely to be religious

>>6108
Wouldn't it be a nice courtesy if God would take a few seconds to come down from the cloud he's been sitting on, and occassionally tell us which things aren't miracles so we wouldn't become believe them for a thousand years and then become jaded when we find out otherwise? It's like God doesn't even think the religions devoted to him, or his holy books are holy enough to spend one iota of his power in correcting any scriptual or scientific misconceptions people have when reading ithe,, or defending their authenticity.

The great thing about agnostics is they can delight in the idea that there might be a God, and he's just the ultimate cosmic troll. He buries some dinosaur bones, and drops a few conflicting "holy" books, and then sits on a sofa, and does nothing but chuckle for a few millenium at the dumb things dumb things we come up with. Must be nice to be a God that is freed from all responsibilities since natural processes already do the work. He never seems to do anything, so he must be the laziest God in existence.

>human brain is so partitioned that someone can genuinely believe in skywizard fairytales while knowing how to build a nuclear reactor
You act like this hasn't been understood for a while now.

>>6137
>you quoted a citation given for a full sentence.
If that were true then it would have been given at the end of the sentence. The second part of the sentence, "enough so for Diderot to mention it in his Encyclopédie" isn't directly supported by the first citation in the sentence and has its own citation.

>Debunked by natural law means we discover a new law of nature that shows miracles are not possible
But I posted the Peter Popoff video in response to
>>6117
>what miracles have been shown to be a result of natural laws?
Showing that something is the result of natural laws and not the supernatural doesn't require discovering new laws of nature that render all miracles impossible. Now you're moving the goalposts.

>but you would know that if you were stem instead of some non-scientist who failed science
Given how much you're stressing the point that we're all non-STEM scum who know nothing of science, you've been strangely reluctant to put forth your own credentials. Are YOU a scientist? I doubt it because it's you who've displayed a stunning lack of understanding of the scientific method and made a number of unsupported claims in this sentence fragment alone, not to mention you would understand how citation works, but since you seem so determined to shift the discussion to personal history, I might as well come clean. I'm not a scientist and never said I was. I'm an undergrad majoring in mathematics and I have never failed a class, much less a science class, which I'm actually quite good at.

>anger with God
Pic related, I can't believe I'm seriously replying to this.

>actually it does because medelian genetics are the physical mechanism of natural selection
But you don't need to know that to understand the basic idea of natural selection, which is why Darwin didn't need to know it. He wasn't basing his theory on a bunch of wild speculation like saying there might be a sky wizard who controls everything, he was basing it on what he already knew and could prove. All you need to understand to explain natural selection is that 1) traits are passed from parent to offspring, 2) certain traits are more favorable to survival than others, and 3) organisms that survive longer are more likely to reproduce and thus pass on their specific traits. From this it follows logically that traits that are more favorable to survival will tend to become more common over generations while traits that are inimical to survival will tend to die out. You don't need to know anything about how the process of inheritance happens, you don't have to understand genes or dominant and recessive alleles or anything.

>Under your proposed structure of science, we would never have hypothesized dark matter, or black holes or an expanding universe, because any attempt to prove them would have been dismissed out of hand because these entities had, at the time they were being discovered, yet to be proven by science - and as you said earlier ITT - if it isn't proved by science it must be dismissed
I claimed no such thing. No, there's nothing wrong with testing an unproved hypothesis, that's the whole point. But if you're going to say that such-and-such event was a miracle and therefore caused by God you have to first be able to give evidence that God exists, otherwise the conclusion is completely unsupported. On the other hand, if you're trying to point to a miracle as evidence of God's existence, you have to first show that it isn't explicable by perfectly natural processes because otherwise there's no reason to suppose it was caused by other factors. So unless you have compelling scientific evidence of God you'd like to share with us, showing that a "miracle" could have occurred without divine interference should rationally lead to the conclusion that that's what probably happened.

>>6137
>and I'm sure you are going to deny saying that now so to save time let me point those series of quotes out for you

>>>6110

>you said

>>. If the claim does have a natural explanation that doesn't require the supernatural and so on, that miracle is basically debunked. Yes, the event happened but no, it wasn't God.
You're right, I will deny that I said those words because if you look at the IDs you'll see that >>6110 isn't me. Yeah, you're definitely not a scientist if you can't do even the most basic fact checking. Pic 2 related.

>So you see if Jan Oort had proposed Dark matter, a scientist that ascribes to your ludicrous theory would have said, no dark matter is unproven so something that relies on something proven is better than something that relies on something unproven, so we will look for another explanation for the gravitational imbalance of the universe.
Which is exactly what scientists at the time did say because there still wasn't sufficient evidence to support the dark matter hypothesis. It's also true that if we could explain the gravitational effects attributed to dark matter by appeal to what we can already observe would have no need to posit the existence of large amounts of invisible matter in space. If the existence of such matter weren't necessary to explain the gravitational effects observed in space then it would seem kind of daft to suggest with any confidence that it exists. So yes, explanations based on already established knowledge are better.

>However, as my OP shows, actual scientists are actually most religious
I assume you mean "mostly religious" since they obviously aren't the most religious group compared to non-scientists. But regardless, it doesn't show that scientists are mostly religious. As others have pointed out, it doesn't even show what you claim in your original post, which is that they're mostly theists. It shows that only 33% believe in God while the rest don't. And if you think "a universal spirit or higher power" is the same as God, note that the higher power option in the survey specifically says "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in a universal spirit or higher power." So if you claim that people who picked that answer do believe in God then you're saying that they're either lying or don't really know what their own beliefs are. Both seem unlikely and both would render their answers unreliable and thus not support your conclusion.

But all of that is relevant only to the claim you make in the OP and not to this claim that "scientists are actually most religious" because there's a difference between believing in God and being religious. Being "religious" generally means being heavily involved in, or at least belonging to, a specific religion and if you look at the survey you'll see that the number of scientists who said they belong to a religion is the same as the number who said they didn't: 48%. The "nothing in particular" category probably includes some of those who believe in God or a universal spirit/higher power, but if they describe their religion as "nothing in particular" then they probably aren't religious.

>and the number of religious scientists increases the younger the scientists are, showing that the view of science religious conflict is an antiquated idea from an antiquated and less sophisticated time in the sciences
Or maybe it's because a lot of them start out as believers and wise up as they get older, while the ones who start out atheists stay that way. I'm not saying this is the case, but it's certainly no more speculative than your interpretation.

I think I'm probably done replying after this, it's already starting to look like we're just going over the same points repeatedly. I'm probably not going to convince you of anything, you don't seem to have anything insightful to tell me and these posts are probably getting tl;dr for everyone else so there's not much point in continuing unless you can come up with a truly impressive reply.

>>6118
>You are playing games with definitions, what is God if not a higher power, is that not how most religious people interpret the word God.

It could be but clearly that's not how the poll in OP's picture defines God. Hence why it gave the option for scientists to believe in one, the other, or both.

If God and a higher power were the same thing, the poll wouldn't have made that distinction. People also define God as a celestial entity even though such a thing could also describe maybe an incredibly powerful extra terrestrial.

If the graph said "Scientists who believe in God and a celestial entity" then that means that according to the graph, a celestial entity is NOT God.

>Not really because neither hinduism nor buddhism have a single unified creation story - also most scientists are based in America or europe, nice try though

Yet there are sects of those religions that DO have creation stories. Again, not everything's about Christianity, statuefag.

>also most scientists are based in America or europe, nice try though

You seem to want to jump on me and say "AHA I new you afeist wa tawkin abowt Cwistinty! like some small child but debate doesn't work that way. I never mentioned Christianity or any aspect of religion exclusive to it until you brought it up. Clearly it is still you who wants this to be about Christianity while I'm content to take into account the fact that there still are scientists NOT based on Europe or America. Remember, any atheist scientist on that poll would have rejected those religions just as much as they've rejected Christianity.

You are aware that Hinduism and Buddhism are major religions, right? You're not that dense, are you?

>In ordinary science we look for the best and most likely explaination. It's only in atheist science that we look for the explanation that doesn't require god because - well that's almost the definition of bias isn't it.

Actually any good scientist, even theist ones, look for explanations that don't require God when doing science.

Francis Collins is a theist. A Christian to be exact so thankfully you don't have to wrap your brain around the fact other religions exist and almost put yourself into a coma again.

When he was working on decoding the human genome, he and his team needed to figure out what base pairs correspond to what outcome. What A,C,D, and Ts result in things like genetic deficiencies, eye color, height, and so on.

During that entire process, he only sought out a natural explanation. It doesn't God is the reason some people are born blind, it's still DNA. This is because science operates on the assumption that there are natural laws that can't be tampered with.

Francis Collins is free to believe that a God created the universe and indeed he does but as soon he steps in the lab and does the actual research, he thinks no differently than an atheist.

>You can explain anything away this way. For example if I wanted to disbelieve in evolution I can just look for explainations taht don't require evolution

The thing is….you would also need evidence. Explaining away a supernatural outcome by demonstrating that it can be done by natural means is just that. Explaining away an already valid and proven natural process by trying to invoke the supernatural doesn't demonstrate anything but your willing ignorance.

>let's look for an explaination that doesn't require god or the supernatural because that is starting with a bias that will affect the results

Except it still is because God is such a problematic variable. Not only is it essentially unprovable, but the fact is that whenever you look at an event, every single time it's easily explainable by natural phenomena.

It would be better to start looking for things we can actually see and test rather than things theists have made impossible to be sure even exists.

Your waifu is very disappointed in you.

>>6153
I think he made this thread in "retaliation" for my thread on Atheist pastors, which hasn't even picked up as much steam. It's a weak attempt to say "There might be Atheist pastors (most of whom knowingly deceive their congregation about being Atheist), but your "religion of science" has scientists who are Theists. Bet you didn't know that?"


He has this falllicious assumption we all treat scientists with the same dogmatic reverance Christians treat their prophets. I'll talk to statuefag for the rest of the post. I personally wasn't led from my religion by reading any Atheistic literature, and I did the mental gymnastics on things like evolution just like Christians do for years. Instead, I was led away by reading the old testament and realizing God was a barbarian created by barbarians for barbarians. After I was willing to consider that possibility, the scientific arguments like evolution became secondary support to clinche my viewpoint. I think I know where statuefag is coming from though because as someone who didn't exercise I used to troll internet forums, and taunt the hormone-driven-bench-pressers at Men's Health forum until I was banned for behaving like a kid…. Opps, I meant to say I know where he's coming from because I also used to believe Atheists followed scientists dogmatically, despite the fact science is self-correcting and founded on statistics and observation for increasingly the likelihood of truth. But if one single error is made, the theory is invalidated and a new one must be made to take the circumstances that make that error into account.

I know statuefag is a troll the that is more interested in giggles than considering the truth otherwose he would try to debate better. The search for the truth is what makes most of us Atheists, even if it means you'll be less happy because you'll be excluded by friends, and won't live believing you have more years after your death.

I know he's a troll, but as a compassionate person I will still take the time and effort to throw him a bone and clarify. There are different levels of Atheists. At the top is a San Francisco club called the "Amazing Apostates" who know the bible in and out and left the religion. They have a very low suceptability to following authority without seeking reasons and turning over every stone.

They are part of a minority of very active ones who try to remove the pledge of allegence and praying in schools. They fight with fundamentalist Christians constantly, and so mutual animosity runs high. They are the ones the news sensationalizes and reports on almost exclusively, since peaceful folk don't attract views. This group is the most likely to join Atheistic orgqnizations and they are so firmly convinced there is no God that they can be dogmatic in some ways. They have their own characteristics such as being the highest educated of tose who do not believe.

There's a sliding scale of traits they tested for (tolerance, happiness. dogmatic thinking, willingness to believe what you're told by authority, etc) and below them you have regular Atheists, then the Agnostics, and those who believe in God but who don't go to church, and finally the Theists. Most non-believers are not as dogmatic or millitant as statuefag believes, (especially not the Agnostics), but since it took around 300 posts to convince him Atheism also criticizes Islam, even when the evidence was in front of his face, I expect this to take around a thousand posts to dawn on him. Hopefully he's posting on other forums too to shift the burden. I think he would need to read 100,000 posts to realize it's an acceptable position that there is no God, and 1,000,000 more posts to decide he would rather not follow his religion of birth (and/or) baptism.

Read about the differences between Atheists for yourself so you can make more insightful attacks. I'd much rather argue with someone who is at least propperly educated on who they are talking to.
https://books.google.com/books?id=Z1hbaAHsAlUC&pg=RA1-PA2&lpg=RA1-PA2&dq=atheist+minister+percent&source=bl&ots=6jQqBpbJ5E&sig=3y9OOhtKU8mlsz0dR4wcWfmCPMk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=EVAfVfD9LsPxoATu_AE&ved=0CCIQ6AEwADgK#v=snippet&q=nai&f=false

>>6196
>thats great but if atheism were the more scientifically sound and rational position, we would expect the majroity of scientists to be atheists, they are not, the majority believe in God or at least some higher power
they are not the majority, go compare the numbers, or at least try to grasp which colored bar is bigger in the chart.

anyway, your hypothesis doesn't hold water because science isn't a finished venture. The only educated conclusions you can possibly make about the scientists' opinion making evidence that the existence of god is a more rational position would look at the overall tendencies, whether there's an extended change and how it could possibly extrapolate, and whether scientific background correlates with religiosity. All of those are in favor of atheism. Really, the growth of science is the growth of irreligion, and you don't need to be a scientist to know that, only a historian.

Remember statuefag that scientists aren't gods, they are fallible but they are the most willful to learn and change their positions of all men. they also have parents, and they come from societies, which are for the most part hermetic religious societies. Also consider >>6139, and now try to explain why scientists could possibly be so less religious and so less theistic than the average population…

>suggesting that as science progresses there is more and more room for God
it actually suggests that the more scientists learn the more they change their minds about religion.
If your hypothesis were the actual explanation it would still have to explain why it seems to contradict another observer fact: that atheism grows with education, which in turn grows with age.

Sure atheism is still a minority view outside science, but its reduction and eventual disappearance is really a myth only told in religious groups, and possibly invented to serve the purposes of a fearful elite priesthood which is well aware of the historical demise of their business. Indeed atheism was inflated during communism and the bubble popped. Many were nominally atheist or incorrectly labeled like that, but apart from that period it has been a very smooth sailing.