NP

[malignd at aol.com]

<<The more interesting point, and the issue I've been focused on, is 
this idea that Science refutes or supplants Religion, that it's an 
either/or proposition, that people who believe in gods are idiots 
incapable of rational thought. It's not correct. In fact, it's 
fundamentalism ... >>


I've probably called people who believe in gods "idiots" more than 
anyone else on this list.  It's rhetorical, but if you insist on making 
it the point, then no, they're not idiots, necessarily.  But one may 
reasonably ask why or how someone living in the present can hold on to 
the explanations offered by a primitive collection of superstitious 
texts to explain the world in which he lives.

Science does supplant religion (if "supplant" can be used to mean 
"offers a more coherent explanation") in the area under discussion; 
i.e., a description of the world we live in, its origins, its history, 
its evolution, etc.  The Bible offers an 8000-year-old planet and 
Noah's ark as an explanation for speciation; some sort of humanoid 
being, pointing here and there and exclaiming in language as he causes 
billions upon billions of stars to appear for cosmology.  Does one 
really have to argue that this is nonsense or worry that one is being 
close-minded or unfair or "fundamentalist" for not giving Noah his due 
or for dismissing such ideas as unworthy of consideration, particularly 
when they are argued as literal truth?  I'll answer that:  no.

<<..., and absolutely at loggerheads with "the scientific method".>>

You seem to have at best a cloudy notion of the scientific method.

<<"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is 
blind.>>

Turn over fortune to get lucky numbers of the day.