for the silliness of faith in a supreme being. I've seen bumper stickers reading, "Militant Agnostic: I don't know and neither do you!"

Well, sure, I guess. I can't prove there's no God(s). Just as nobody can prove there's no Flying Spaghetti Monster or Tooth Fairy.

Organized religions have legions of believers, extensive texts and rituals, and in many cases long histories of structured belief systems and legal authority. That doesn't make their deities any more demonstrably extant.

Atheism can be an article of faith, or it can be the result of logic. I suppose we can say that the denial of imaginary beings is no more convincing than the acceptance of imaginary beings. But, given that evidence is what we need to prove the existence of anything, I'd say the absence of evidence is a good guide to the non-existence of something, until that thing is proven definitively to exist.

You will find a wide range of opinions here.

An argument from authority needs..........authority.

I read this as more of an opinion piece than an argument from authority.

That's a little presumptive. Especially when your main objection against the kids is that they're brash and vain.

I would rather hear this from some senior scientist who knows the terrible damage atheism has done to science over the years. Should be easy enough to find one. Maybe zombie Lysenko would be available.

The only authority is Mother Nature herself. She is the final arbiter of fact. The extent to which your version of fact disagrees with nature, is the extent to which your system of belief is wrong.

Science doesn't always get it right, but here's what's important.

Science is malleable. What is truth is nature. Science only tries to discover what nature is about. That doesn't mean that science cannot know anything. The Earth does revolve around the Sun. All life forms on Earth did arise from a common ancestor. The solar system is about 4.5 billion years old. The universe is about 13.72 billion years old. Etc.

To dispute these facts, is to dispute science as a way to know. If you are going to do that, you have to convince people that you have a better way of knowing than science. But science uses the universe, and Mother Nature herself as the judge.

All the religious have is the authority of a God of whom they cannot demonstrate existence other than a collection of writings with questionable provenance dating back to times when a wheel barrow was emergent technology.

I think humans have come further than that.

Thanks.

Paragraph one merely states a contention but does not examine on what he bases that contention, or even what that contention is in full.

Then there is the italicised conclusion following that which does not actually follow from the paragraph, it is just a statement of the author's belief.

Paragraph 2 presents the authors definition of "Atheism". but then it is combined with the author's umbrage at the existence of smug gits who wear their supposed rationality as a badge. There are similar fools in any movement who pretend that their beliefs, or lack of them, make them superior to all others; one example is the Republican party.

Paragraph 3 does not follow from paragraph 2 and also ignores the often stated positions of many theists that there is proof of the objective reality of their chosen flavour of God. Using the scientific evidence and methods to dismantle that sort of nonsense is one way of showing the ignorance and foolishness. Railing against such use is to delegitimise the use of evidence and method in any area of which the author does not approve.

Paragraph 4 presents a false statement, that "Atheism" is a philosophy. It is not, it is the lack of belief in any deity or deities. Many atheists follow humanist ethics and philosophies, many do not. Atheism makes no philosophical claims, only that there is no deity. The false association of atheism with philosophy is brought about by the need for atheists to argue for rational ethics and philosophies in the face of claims such as "You can't be good without God".

Paragraph 5 is unconnected again, being just a rant about creationists and how you do not scientific evidence and method to disprove their contentions. I suggest that reading the blog Panda's Thumb might be enlightening.

Paragraph 6, unconnected again, just a declaration that you should not use scientific method or evidence to either undermine false beliefs or to guard against being affected by false belief.

The final statement just underlines the authors mindless rant. The idea is not "Protecting you from people you don’t like..." but from ideas that are harmful either of themselves or by their extension by abusive preachers and false prophets. The author might as well be saying that you should not use scientific method and argument to argue against hospital hygene.

is that atheism and science are simply two different manifestations of skeptical inquiry, the view that the strength of one's convictions should be directly related to the strength of the evidence supporting those convictions. So his lack of understanding as to why he would see atheists thinking as scientists do is vacuous pap.

Just another hack with a deadline to meet and nothing worth writing about.

There is no possible way I could write something more stupid than them. Plus, I'm much more interesting......

You're wrong about that.

Proof: this OP.

But I read it right the first time: nothing he wrote demonstrated how atheism is in his science.

How are atheists expressing their opinions and defending their positions a threat to him? His criticisms of atheists make little sense. What a bunch of anti-intellectual crap.

A true intellectual heavy-weight.

Julie

...and indeed likely posted, to convey.

There is indeed a conflation of science and atheism that needs to be addressed, and some of that is even the fault of atheists. Probably me for one occasionally. It's easy, but sometimes lazy, to argue that "science says X" to refute religious superstitions. Sometimes such a scant rebuttal is perfectly adequate if we are talking about simple, widely understood by laymen, and settled science. Examples here would be refutations of the standard lunacy that the laws of thermodynamics say that the earth and life could not have increased in order over time naturally, because entropy always increases. Anyone at all with no scientific credibility can summarily dismiss that religious argument because all it takes is 3rd grade English and a couple of pages in any mass market physics text to know that the law applies to closed systems and that the earth, what with that big fiery orange ball in the sky and all, surely isn't one.

The temptation though is to rely on similar summary dismissals in areas of science that are ot settled and not really well understood outside specialists. My scientific understanding is even 2-3 yrs less than the writer cited here, so I'm even less credible in claiming knowledge of, say, cosmogony. I understand it more than most people you'd hit by throwing a brick into a crowd. In all humility probably better than most you'd hit throwing a caber into a crowd. But beyond simplified explanations from real experts and some nugatory scratching at the math involved, I'm essentially bugger all use to anyone who wants to get the finer details of the first few seconds post-singularity. Now I've never claimed to be an expert but I probably have asserted more as settled science than Hawking et al would be comfortable doing if called on to back me up. Now of course I can nigh guarantee they'd be more comfortable backing me up, with the odd eye roll no doubt, than anyone who claims that this lack of precise understanding automatically gets a gap filled with one particular syncretic bronze age Middle Eastern myth, but I'd certainly be in for a "Nobody knows that for sure; least of all you, you semi-educated tit" remonstration.

But this latter raises the much greater conflation with atheism and science that is far more errant and that is the opinion of religious apologists. We are told routinely, even here, that we worship scientific materialism. Even atheists who are not particularly fans let alone practitioners of science are blamed by proxy for the atomic bomb, eugenics, and thalidomide birth defects. One sentence in this cite is indeed absolute truth. Atheism IS indeed nothing more than the "lack of belief in any sort of god". You'll notice there a complete absence of any positive claim whatsoever, including the ability, or need, to prove any or all gods don't exist - so why then does his next paragraph "correct" our suddenly assumed desire to do just that?

We are told that any gap in our personal knowledge of science means there is a gap that we cannot in good conscience exclude from God (although somehow it's perfectly ok for both us and the religionists to ignore the possibility that Zeus or Osiris did it). Even if there are a dozen people hanging out at the local University faculty lounge who could give cogent and complete materialistic explanations, if I cannot then I must accept the possibility that an amalgam of sky and war gods El and Yahweh, filtered through Zoroastrianism, hellenistic philosophy and Levantine mystery cult sophistry with a soupcon of early Renaissance humanism is a valid and acceptable theory that should not be ignored. Why atheistic assumptions of scientific acumen are worthy of excoriation while assumptions that a bunch of illiterate nomadic goatherders in 2nd millennium BCE Mesopotamia got the nature of ultimate reality spot on are supposed to be taken as reasonable alternatives is beyond me but hey.

So Dan you are right. Atheism doesn't make you a scientist, or particularly rational or intelligent. It makes you a skeptic in one area, but not all too. But that's like saying being Asian-American doesn't make you excel in math, or being African-American doesn't make you excel in basketball. Absolutely true statements all, but absolutely redundant statements all, as only real idiots confuse correlation with not just causation, but universal causation. As you'll find out Dan, more scientists are atheists the higher their understanding of hard science gets. PhD's in biology or physics are far more likely to be atheists than BSc's. Doesn't mean Michael Behe's one any more than it means I'm not. But it does mean that atheism and scientific knowledge, like your other "doesn't means" are positively correlated. If you wanted to clear out a spot for yourself once you graduate then, you'd be better off tossing that caber into a crowd of atheists than believers, no? Ever wonder why?

That's an automatic disqualifier to me. It's the same kind of oversimplistic, thoroughly false stereotyping that we despise when we hear it from the fundamentalists.

Haven't seen any deductive proof of any religious claims (well, core claims to be honest. Guess I have seen decent proof that Zayd ibn Harithah was married) yet but would be happy to be corrected.

This post is little but a strawman attack.