Any other atheists here? Some frustration

[companioncube#3]

@Thorne,

re: SCIENCE IS INTERESTING & IF YOU DON'T AGREE, YOU CAN FUCK OFF...

Must be a younger generation thing, then. I don't see the humor.

It's tongue-and-cheek, of course. When I am acting as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses (one of my part-time jobs while I finish my degree), a significant slice of my efforts is directed at framing the message properly. I try to tell science as a story, giving historical context for the results I'm presenting and prospects for the future, possible applications in other areas which might matter to students' lives. I make (bad) jokes. As I said, I fall squarely in Tyson's camp when it comes to communicating science. Tyson, incidentally, is one of my favourite contemporary popular science writers. I was happy to see you refer to Asimov. His work is another kind of celebration of science for the fiction-loving layperson.

re: Church and community

What I'm trying to say is that the neighborhood churches/temples/mosques can do an inordinate amount of good for their communities, but that the rigid, uncompromising belief systems they preach make their motives suspect in my mind.

We are in complete agreement. This is exactly what I think, too. It is not to say that the belief system is necessary in order to generate the community, but this is something that organized religion often offers adherents that secularists would do well to understand. We cannot hope to get rid of the toxic components of religion without having a way of preserving, in one form or another, all the good it has done and continues to do.

@Kuskovian:

: Do you accept everything a scientist tells you, or do you go out and preform the "experiments" for yourself?

If so which experimental procedures do you reproduce and which do you take on good "faith"?

Science and religion; two sides of the same coin from my perspective.

Of course one will take from each what they will.

And it harm not others do as thou wilt.

You are far off the mark here. You really are off. Believing what scientists tell me is true is nothing at all like believing what a priest tells me is true. You are stretching the meaning of the word "faith" here until it is entirely useless for the purposes of this discussion.

Let me show you. An anecdote. My research supervisor comes into our weekly seminar and tells me how her research is going, that she's excited to report that she has found this new genetic marker for skin cancer in this certain species of mouse. I sit there and I write down the notes, reproduce the data on a term test to get an A, and then after that I use her research as an example when teaching some students the basics of malignancy. Mind you, I haven't read through her data, I haven't seen her mice, and I know that her work is in the early stages and hasn't been published (that is to say, it hasn't gone through peer-review). You would say that I am taking her results on "faith." Okay.

So let's go to another scenario. I am in church and I am told my a priest that there is an all-knowing, all-loving god in the sky who had a son a long time ago born of a virgin in a manger and who later died for my sins and three days later, he rose from the dead and that's why we have Easter. As evidence he points to his bible. If I believed him, you would call that "faith." Okay.

I would say that using the word "faith" to describe my credulity in both these cases is misleading and quite frankly, disingenuous. The first scenario describes the kind of reasonable belief that everyone engages in, not only in science but in every-day life. Sure. My research supervisor could be lying to me. Her numbers could be fudged. Her analysis could be flawed. But why stop there? Perhaps I don't have a research supervisor at all, and I'm actually a psychiatric patient in a mental institution who just imagined the whole thing. You see, if you use the word "faith" to indiscriminately describe belief in any piece of information that one does not know for certain, then you will end up spiralling down into this maddening pit of Cartesian scepticism that sucks all meaning out of the debate we were trying to have in the first place.

In stark contrast to the first, the second scenario is so unreasonable, so far-fetched, so outlandish, that you actually have to suspend all critical thought to swallow it. And that's exactly what the religious types want you to do. In the realm of religion, faith without evidence is celebrated. It is the ideal. It is a prerequisite for piety. Ask too many questions and you will be told that this is a character-flaw, that you have to let go of your doubts and give yourself over to god. Want an explanation of how a virgin could give birth? You have to have faith. Want an explanation of how a man three days dead could come back to life? You have to have faith. Want to know where God came from in the first place, and why a being so powerful and grand would care what we mere mortals do with our Sunday mornings, and who we slept with the night before, and if we used birth control and what kind of birth control it was because some kinds are eviller than others? You have to have faith.

This is the exact opposite of what would happen if I were to go to my research supervisor and ask to see her evidence for the cancer marker. Her face would light up and she'd down me in laboratory notes. She'd rattle on about her procedure and results until I fell asleep or ran away. And then, if I had the audacity to question her methods, scrutinize the data, bring up conflicting results in the literature, she'd probably be more impressed than defensive. After all, once the work is published, it will be scrutinized and questioned by every other scientist in the field. Other laboratories will repeat her experiments and if the data cannot be reproduced, she will be discredited. Unlike religion, critical inquiry is at the heart of any truly scientific endeavour. And unlike religion, scientific theories have very clear criteria for being falsified.

And I guess that's really the crux of it. Science is interested in building models of the world which predict the results of experiments, and can be falsified by experiments. Religion has no such procedure for self-improvement. Why would it? God is perfect, the word of god is perfect, the will of god is absolute and who are we to question it?

So don't tell me that science and religion are two sides of the same coin. They are in fact so different that if one were a coin, the other would be sweet potato pie.

[Shwenn]

@Thorne,

re: SCIENCE IS INTERESTING & IF YOU DON'T AGREE, YOU CAN FUCK OFF...



It's tongue-and-cheek, of course. When I am acting as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses (one of my part-time jobs while I finish my degree), a significant slice of my efforts is directed at framing the message properly.

I'm the same way as companioncube. I tutored physics at university and I worked very hard at framing the message. My favorite trick, which I picked up from my Cal 2 professor, was that I never asked, "Do you understand?" I only asked, "Do you agree?" I didn't want them to feel ashamed and stupid for not getting it. I wanted them to argue with me so I could understand their frame of mind and be in a better position to structure the information in a way they could absorb it.

I think most people in the scientific community feel that way. We are passionate about sharing our love. To the point of being rather annoying.

That is what is so funny. It's just so wrong and so completely out of character.

See, Tyson's issue with Dawkins is that he isn't like that. And he isn't. I understand why he isn't like that. He's an evolutionary biologist and so he's been under attack his whole career because of his field. You can only expect so much patience from a person.

But Dawkins understood why Tyson had a problem with his attitude. He told that story only to illustrate that, not only is it possible for a person in the scientific community to abandon this desire to foment interest, but he knew of one who was at the absolute opposite extreme.

I guarantee you that just about every person in that room who laughed at that story shared our desire to inspire a love of science. Even Tyson laughed. It's just a funny story.

[Thorne]

@Thorne,

re: SCIENCE IS INTERESTING & IF YOU DON'T AGREE, YOU CAN FUCK OFF...

It's tongue-and-cheek, of course. When I am acting as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses (one of my part-time jobs while I finish my degree), a significant slice of my efforts is directed at framing the message properly. I try to tell science as a story, giving historical context for the results I'm presenting and prospects for the future, possible applications in other areas which might matter to students' lives. I make (bad) jokes. As I said, I fall squarely in Tyson's camp when it comes to communicating science. Tyson, incidentally, is one of my favourite contemporary popular science writers. I was happy to see you refer to Asimov. His work is another kind of celebration of science for the fiction-loving layperson.

Yes, I understand that it's tongue in cheek. I suppose my own sense of humor is too straight (unlikely) or far to warped (that's more likely) to get a laugh from it. To each his own.

As for Tyson, I've just recently bought a copy of his book, "Death by Black Hole" but haven't had a chance to read it yet. I've seen him many times on TV science programs and was impressed enough to remember who he is, so I thought I'd give it a try.

And Asimov's works which I mentioned were not his fiction, but his science essays. Ranging from astronomy through zoology, and everything in between, I always found his works both entertaining (with one exception, which dealt with the inner workings of proteins and amino acids) and educational. That's not to say I haven't also enjoyed his fiction: I have.