Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
Surprisingly, a very powerful weapon against the zealots is the Bible! It is my experience that those who most deeply believe in the literal word of the Bible have very little true understanding of it. The Bible is filled with contradictions and most of those people tend to pick and choose among the versions which most appeal to them.
He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword... this is so true.

I also agree with Thorne in that it is not faith which is the problem but Dogma. Literal interpretations and rigid adherence to outdated concepts. Most Christians (and muslims and hindus and sikhs) I have talked to have been intelligent and questioning and are prepared to change their beliefs and ideas in the face of new evidence. Maybe this is because most of the religious types I have met are university graduates and British and we British are no longer quite so zealous about our religion these days (unlike 500 years ago when you could be executed for being catholic or a protestant depending on which monarch was in power and the poor priests were getting all confused about whether they were allowed to get married or not). We don't tend to have the really extreme fundamentalists, though they are creeping over slowly.

The trouble is that you have to avoid dogma on both sides. You have to always be open to possibilities and the fact that new evidence can change your views. One piece of information I read intrigued me by suggesting that science as a discipline could never have happened without monotheistic religion. Partly because of the mindset of the monotheist (there is only one god so you have to explain many contradictory phenomena in a way that is more than 'the weather gods are fighting')) and partly because many of the ancient classical texts on philosophy and science were for many years preserved by the Islamic and Christian scholars (all medieval universities were run by the catholic church hence the eccliastical like hierarchy many of them have.)

And human beings are not the only species capable of advanced deductive reasoning. Many other species can do it too.The only difference is that we can communicate things we have learnt to the next generation using non verbal means. This means that every generation of dolphin or blue tit has to learn from scratch how to do something whereas we can write a book about it (or set up a webpage) and give the next generation (and all subsequent ones) a headstart. Until we had this we were no different to many other species.

Now that is assuming that what you mean by deductive reasoning is problem solving intelligence. If, however, you mean abstract thought... well that is a different matter and there are a lot of interesting theories about that (some of them involving the beleif that we once lived on the sea shore where there was a lot of omega 3/essential fatty acid containing seafood....)