Christians are anti-science.

T. A. Gardner said:
I have a question...

In the last 300 years which group / society that predominately follows which religion, has made the most scientific advances on the planet?
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Good questions (there are actually two of them here). Science, however, is not an 'advance'. It is just a set of falsifiable theories.

Which society? Obviously, the Western world societies, Europe, the United States, etc. Why? A pretty important cultural difference, it turns out. Our way is the Greek way. We can take apart a bit of the world, model it, twiddle with it, and use what we learn by inserting it back into the whole. That's not really easy in the integrated view of the Universe the East has. You CAN'T take a bit of the Universe apart and examine it, because you can't fill it with the inner spirit that makes that bit possible.

To be fair, some things DID come out of Eastern culture, such things as conflaguration explosive (low explosives)...rather by accident! He was actually trying to find the essence of life but wound up burning down his house. Paper also. Cranks and pistons, block printing, and even the magnetic compass came out of the Eastern culture. They used the compass as a fortune telling device. What fortunes we made on that thing when we got ahold of it and put it in our ships!

Which religion? I would say Christian being the predominant one, the religion of most of Europe and quite predominate in the United States.

That said, important theories of science came from atheists, Islam, Hindi, Buddhist, shinto, Judaism, Tao, and even believers of Norse, Roman, or Greek gods.
In the past 300 years, that would be quite definitely Christianity as the predominant religion as having created the most of the existing theories of science.

Several predominant nonscientific theories arose out of the same societies. The Theory of Abiogenesis, created in ancient Greece, and Theory of Creation, created in ancient Israel. The Theory of Evolution was also first proposed by the ancient Greeks, long before Darwin. The Theory of the Big Bang came out of Belgium from a Catholic Priest in 1931 by Georges Lemaitre. The Theory of the Continuum is much older. It's origins are unknown, but it has been discussed in ancient Greece, in ancient Israel, and in China.

All of these are not theories of science. They are just theories, and they remain circular arguments, the way they began. They are each religions.
 
Into the Night said:
Depends.

If you believe there is no god or gods, that is a religion.

If you simply do not accept any religion, that is simply not a religion. It allows for the possibility of a god or gods existing, but doesn't state either way.
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The last is called "Secularism." Secularists, unlike Atheists, don't care if there is or isn't a god or gods. They have no interest in this. Atheists by definition believe there is no god.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
The last is called "Secularism." Secularists, unlike Atheists, don't care if there is or isn't a god or gods. They have no interest in this. Atheists by definition believe there is no god.
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You are in error. You have those two reversed.

I am an atheist. I am an atheist by virtue of lacking any theism. Let me run you through it one time ...

Asynchronous: Lacking any synchronization or synchronicity
Amoral: Lacking any morality component
Amorphous: Lacking any form
Apolitical: Lacking any political component
Asexual: Lacking any sex
Atypical: Lacking any typicality (I believe I just invented a word there)
Atheist: Lacking any theism.

Note that this has nothing to do with any gods. It is strictly about theism, or more specifically, the lack of it. This means that I do not even have Budhism because it is nonetheless a religion/theism despite not having any god/deity.

Stating, or having the affirmative belief, that there is no god or gods is a theistic statement and makes one theistic, which precludes one from being atheistic, but it does make one secular.

I am an atheist. I do not reject your God; I simply don't have it. I don't deny your house exists, nor do I insist that your house does exist in any specific form or that you even have one; whatever domicile you might have, I simply don't have it.
 
AProudLefty said:
Depends on what they believe.
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That's true of anybody. There isn't anything about the theory that the Christian God did his magick and created everything OR ... that there was some initial creation that included God as part of everything that was "created."

There isn't anything in any of that which violates the laws of the nature that was created.

Now if someone decides to "tack on" some violation of physics that's his/her own addition.
 
IBDaMann said:
That's true of anybody. There isn't anything about the theory that the Christian God did his magick and created everything OR ... that there was some initial creation that included God as part of everything that was "created."

There isn't anything in any of that which violates the laws of the nature that was created.

Now if someone decides to "tack on" some violation of physics that's his/her own addition.
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When a Creationist says that the Earth is 6,000 years old, he assumes that the scientists are lying or that the Devil has been planting false evidence.
 
T. A. Gardner said:
The last is called "Secularism." Secularists, unlike Atheists, don't care if there is or isn't a god or gods. They have no interest in this. Atheists by definition believe there is no god.
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Uh. No. Atheists are not theists by definition. That what the 'A' in 'atheist' means.

However, a lot of atheists are not atheists no matter what they call themselves. They are anti god believers. That's a religion. It is theism.
 
AProudLefty said:
When a Creationist says that the Earth is 6,000 years old, he assumes that the scientists are lying or that the Devil has been planting false evidence.
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Science is not scientists. Scientists can and do lie. Science does not. Scientists come in all religious flavors. Science is purely atheistic (it is devoid of any theism).

The earth might very well be ~6,000 years old. Nobody can verify its true age without a time machine. Regardless, science does not speculate about the past; only humans do. Science predicts nature, i.e. future tense.

Personally, I am a huge fan of Darwin's theory. I think the age of the earth is closer to 4.5 billion years +/- 400 million years. I think earth is a negligible speck in a massive expanding universe and that there are lots and lots of other life forms elsewhere in the universe, none having any real chance of running into any of us. All of these are my beliefs and thus my speculations. None of this is science.
 
Into the Night said:
Uh. No. Atheists are not theists by definition. That what the 'A' in 'atheist' means.

However, a lot of atheists are not atheists no matter what they call themselves. They are anti god believers. That's a religion. It is theism.
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Bingo.

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IBDaMann said:
Science is not scientists. Scientists can and do lie. Science does not. Scientists come in all religious flavors. Science is purely atheistic (it is devoid of any theism).

The earth might very well be ~6,000 years old. Nobody can verify its true age without a time machine. Regardless, science does not speculate about the past; only humans do. Science predicts nature, i.e. future tense.

Personally, I am a huge fan of Darwin's theory. I think the age of the earth is closer to 4.5 billion years +/- 400 million years. I think earth is a negligible speck in a massive expanding universe and that there is lots and lots of other life forms elsewhere in the universe, none of which has any real chance of running into any of us. All of these are my beliefs and thus my speculations. None of this is science.
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The fossils exist. And yes we can verify their ages using various equipment.

And yes I think there are life forms elsewhere but it's a speculation to say they cannot reach us.
 
AProudLefty said:
The fossils exist. And yes we can verify their ages using various equipment.
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Nope. That's the rub.

Belief in radiometric dating requires faith. I happen to believe in radiometric dating, i.e. I am a huge fan. There is one huge problem that very few people wish to discuss which is that when radiometric dating is performed, the resulting figure really is the upper limit as to how old something can possibly be ... whereas we humans, simply out of our psychological "need to know" or to feel like we "know," simply declare that value as the actual age. The reality is that any object so measured could, in reality, be much younger. To us humans, that is a very unsatisfying thought ... so we choose instead to believe that we are reading the actual, true age and we feel so much more satisfied and we boast about the amazing truths that we "learned." Unfortunately it's merely what we are choosing to believe.

You may already be aware of this but let give you a rundown on how radiometric dating works. Many different unstable isotopes are created all the time. They decay into "decay material" at an extremely stable rate called the "half-life" and this rate amazingly is unaffected by temperature, pressure and any other environmental factors. So far so good. If a rock R1 is created in the earth on a particular day with a quantity Q of isotope I with a half-life of 100,000 years ... and that rock is radiometrically "dated" 100,000 years later, what will happen is that the amount of I will be measured and the decay material D will be measured and will be discovered to be of equal quantities and will be declared to be 100,000 years old.

But the day before rock R1 was "dated" a brand new rock R2 was created that day in an equivalent manner as R1 and was shot out of a volcano. Due to a bizarre set of circumstances, in the region where R2 was created there also happened to be high levels of D. In fact, R2 began its life yesterday with three times as much of the decay material as it contains of I. So the day after it comes out of the earth and is one day old, it is "dated" and declared to be 200,000 years old, twice as old as R1. It's one day old but it appears to be 200,000 years old. What do we do?

Well, instead of disrupting society and declaring that we really don't know any of the stuff we have claimed vehemently "to know" ... we quietly decide that if there are any instances like that of R2, we just include that in our "margin of error" for our overarching "model" of speculation about the past. We go on believing the "official" timeline of events and we give ourselves order and satisfaction in our lives. We even get to go to online forums and bash people who don't accept the "official" timeline of events as being "anti-science." Isn't that great?

Actually, it's not that great. Trust me. I used to do it and I'm not proud of it.

AProudLefty said:
And yes I think there are life forms elsewhere but it's a speculation to say they cannot reach us.
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I didn't make any claims about inability to reach us. I stated a negligible probability of ever reaching us. We humans will only exist for a finite amount of time. We will likely run out of resources and die out long before we achieve the means to get ourselves to some other sustainably habitable place. Other life forms are restricted to the same laws of physics that govern our lives ... and distance is distance. I'll change my tune when someone starts installing powering stations between galaxies.
 
IBDaMann said:
I didn't make any claims about inability to reach us. I stated a negligible probability of ever reaching us. We humans will only exist for a finite amount of time. We will likely run out of resources and die out long before we achieve the means to get ourselves to some other sustainably habitable place. Other life forms are restricted to the same laws of physics that govern our lives ... and distance is distance. I'll change my tune when someone starts installing powering stations between galaxies.
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You said all of your statements are speculations and I was agreeing.

We have no idea how advanced their technologies are.
 
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