Two scientists discuss why they became atheist, or why they became Christian

Daylight63 said:
These are two really interesting stories from different sides. It would be fun if there was a way to rationally discuss these two positions without offending people.

Such is the gift of faith I suppose.
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There is a way to discuss the two positions without offending people, respect the other person point of view. If you don't two things happen, you offend the other person and they have no reason to respect your position.
 
Yakuda said:
There is a way to discuss the two positions without offending people, respect the other person point of view. If you don't two things happen, you offend the other person and they have no reason to respect your position.
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Bet you are incapable of saying something positive about the atheist position.
 
Cypress said:
Lots of people. Dawkins has sold millions of books, and is widely considered the world's leading public atheist intellectual. Dawkins has probably sold more books than Nietchze, Sartre, and Camus combined.

Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project, and a presidential science advisor.


Does the fact you have two thousand threads about Trump qualify as creepy? I can't talk about Trump all the time, even if you can.
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"Atheist intellectual" is a contradiction!
 
Daylight63 said:
Bet you are incapable of saying something positive about the atheist position.
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What position? That there is no evidence for the existence of God? There is nothing positive or negative today about that position. It's just a position. I can respect that someone may have come about talhat position after sincere contemplation about the issue.

Your turn about theism.
 
Yakuda said:
What position? That there is no evidence for the existence of God? There is nothing positive or negative today about that position. It's just a position. I can respect that someone may have come about talhat position after sincere contemplation about the issue.

Your turn about theism.
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I already have on numerous occasions.

I think Christianity is a wonderful religion that asks its adherents to be aware of their own personal foibles and abilities to be in error. I love the concept of "grace" but as a secular concept that we all can grant grace to each other knowing that we will one day require it from others. I love the "love thy enemy" bit (even if we don't all follow that one).

Religion in general provides a lot of emotional support for the believers. It has also convinced some people to do good when maybe they otherwise wouldn't.

(See? At least I can find something to admire in the opposite position from me. I see the best you can do is just say it's not a position right after suggesting that both positions need to respect each other. Basically you couldn't complete the task)
 
Daylight63 said:
I already have on numerous occasions.

I think Christianity is a wonderful religion that asks its adherents to be aware of their own personal foibles and abilities to be in error. I love the concept of "grace" but as a secular concept that we all can grant grace to each other knowing that we will one day require it from others. I love the "love thy enemy" bit (even if we don't all follow that one).

Religion in general provides a lot of emotional support for the believers. It has also convinced some people to do good when maybe they otherwise wouldn't.

(See? At least I can find something to admire in the opposite position from me. I see the best you can do is just say it's not a position right after suggesting that both positions need to respect each other. Basically you couldn't complete the task)
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I did complete the task you're just not happy with how I did so. I don't control your happiness. So enlighten me with the positives of atheism.
 
Daylight63 said:
Dawkins is a good author. There are many other great atheist writers out there as well, so Dawkins isn't the only game in town. I really liked Sam Harris's "The End of Faith".

I liked Dawkins story because it showed a path to atheism that is perfectly rational and not the usual "mad at god" accusation which many critics of atheism use in order to downplay the seriousness of one's personal faith journey.

Collins is interesting because he came at it from the exact opposite route which I find quite interesting (especially since not all of CS Lewis' arguments for God are less than great). Of course he was working initially in the quantum world so he probably saw some incomprehensibly weird stuff. But really sounds like he came to Christianity from the same position that Dawkins started off at: wonder at the universe.

In my personal opinion, the route Dawkins took is far more "scientific" (pare out those explanatory variables that are not needed) than Collins. Not that I think Collins is a bad scientist or anything. Far from it. Collins came up against the wonder and felt there was a need for some other explanatory variable. It just so happened that he was able to find it, out of all the different conceptions of God, in Christianity. Even Murray Gell-Mann leveraged the 8-fold way of eastern religion to help him start the standard model in physics.

Religions seem to fill a very important need to the human brain: putting some "face" on the unknown. While the scientist waits for the explanatory variable to reveal itself the person of faith finds those things they cannot immediate understand and "explains" it with something that feels like it answers the questions (even if they cannot be shared by all observers).
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really don't care about dawkins
 
Cypress said:
Lots of people. Dawkins has sold millions of books, and is widely considered the world's leading public atheist intellectual. Dawkins has probably sold more books than Nietchze, Sartre, and Camus combined.

Collins was the head of the Human Genome Project, and a presidential science advisor.


Does the fact you have two thousand threads about Trump qualify as creepy? I can't talk about Trump all the time, even if you can.
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I guess. I really have no interest in Dawkins.
 
Daylight63 said:
I already have on numerous occasions.

I think Christianity is a wonderful religion that asks its adherents to be aware of their own personal foibles and abilities to be in error. I love the concept of "grace" but as a secular concept that we all can grant grace to each other knowing that we will one day require it from others. I love the "love thy enemy" bit (even if we don't all follow that one).

Religion in general provides a lot of emotional support for the believers. It has also convinced some people to do good when maybe they otherwise wouldn't.

(See? At least I can find something to admire in the opposite position from me. I see the best you can do is just say it's not a position right after suggesting that both positions need to respect each other. Basically you couldn't complete the task)
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atheists invariably support some form of eugenics, population reduction, and totalitarianism.
 
Hume said:
really don't care about dawkins
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Clearly. I'd recommend Sam Harris or maybe Christopher Hitchens. Although Hitchens punches kind of hard from time to time.

But honestly the best writings that I find that confirm my atheism to be some of the less biased histories of the Bible and the origins of the Christian faith. No doubt the same sort of things could be said about every single religion (but some won't necessarily allow it). It's the evidence of the firm hand of man in not only generating but expanding the concept of God.

The less "atheist useful" stuff is the more philosophical views of God as some sort of "essence of order" in the universe or some such. The "Deistic" type of God is attractive for the simple reason that it so seldom has any specific REQUIREMENTS to explain it or understand it. It is a placeholder for a concept to be understood at a later time. It's really hard to draw any meaningful positions from such a broadly ecumenical and nearly incomprehensibly vague description of God. And it's almost impossible to debate against that sort of position.

The thing I find fascinating about Collins' position is one that I find from a close personal friend of mine. A very intelligent person who determined that of all the concepts of God the Christian concept seems to this person to be the most logical. I obviously differ in opinion on this, but I've definitely seen it before. It appears Collins was in need of the supernatural to help him better appreciate what he saw in nature. But it just so happened that the faith he most assuredly grew up surrounded by (even if he was not involved) was the one that he settled on, that made the most sense to him. But the jump from "unknown explanatory variable" to "Being from a small colony of the Roman Empire that one must literally believe in in order to achieve salvation and who is simultaneously God and Not-God seems a bit of a stretch in the INFERENCE department.
 
Yakuda said:
I did complete the task you're just not happy with how I did so. I don't control your happiness. So enlighten me with the positives of atheism.
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Freedom. Freedom from any sort of imaginary thought crime. And possibly an unvarnished view of reality. It also brings with it the possibility of eliminating one more made-up differentiator between people. We already put ourselves in silos and act as if the other silos are not worthy.

It also opens the door to a much harder task of figuring out the world without reliance on something that we made up to feel better about the explanations.

As Cypress has noted: the scientist does not claim perfect knowledge. But by the same token, the scientist does NOT say "...therefore any idea is equal to every other idea."
 
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