Huzzah for Boosterism...

The “magnificent P-Zed” Myers, uncompromising howler for science, most militant of the militant atheists – has finally surpassed even himself.  Dismissing the straw-man demand for “incidents” that characterize the “sins” of Christianity against science with a simple “Bleh”, Dr Myers – or perhaps more appropriately his superhero alter-ego Pharyngula dispatches his worthless foe with a Power Punch to rival any atomic-powered cephalopod.

His twelve “objections,” numbered casually after the Roman fashion, are fit for nailing to any church door.  The everyday observations of a working professor of biology approaching finals are worthy of any dedicated Reformer, except that … jeez … how does he do that?  I mean honestly, I could work for years on carefully crafted posts and once in a while I might stumble on something as insightful as this.  But every day?

Let me get to the point.  Professor Myers has encapsulated the problem with religion so exactly in this post that there’s really very little to add.  If I could figure out how to do trackbacks this would be the time to do it.  To the scientist, religion is not simply a set of assertions, most of which are errors.  It isn’t just the major facts that the religious (and more generally the “spiritual”) have wrong.  If that were the case we could just hash out our disagreements and come to some sort of consensus.  But the difficultly is much deeper than that.  The problem is that those who are religious/faithful and those who are secular/rational use entirely different criteria for measuring truth.

This is not shocking to anyone who has studied the issue.  A reasoned approach to any subject – the existence of God perhaps – will be countered in the realm of faith by simply asking: “perhaps reason is wrong.”  The notion is absurd.  Of course a particular given reason for any belief can be wrong, but to be able to show that it was wrong the challenger would have to give reasons.   The faithful wish to sidestep that altogether and reject the notion of reason itself.  How are they going to do that – without giving reasons?

I only wish I could put it as clearly as Dr Myers.

- jack*

Comments

[Adam Stanhope]

Thanks for linking to that.

Hao jiu bu jian le!

Long time no see!