"False statement. Religions do as much for people as science does, and science springs from religious tradition. St. Lukes, Methodist hospital and the like all founded by Christians. So tha increases life span. Increasing standard of living: Buddhist Bhutan enforces Buddhist law and morals, improving the quality of life. Hizbullah helped rebuild devastated Lebanon after the 2005 war. Science is not better than the religion. Religion is not better than science. The reason is that they are the same thing. Science and christianity have as much in common as Buddhism and Islam. It is nearly impossible that both are true, and still very unlikely that either are true."
Yes, but science gives us the medical technology that actually gives us the capability to save lives. If our hospitals were based on prayer and divine intervention, then no, it would not increase our lifespan. Think of all the hospitals started by secular governments as opposed to religious hospitals. They far outnumber. Let's try this, secular law enforces secular morals thus improving the standard of living. Except, I don't mean standard of living like that, I mean standard of living as in more potable water for everyone, refrigerators, doctors, real income per capita. How can you point at just a few examples of where religion helps, ignore the terrible religion has caused, and then completely disregard the massive leaps and bounds in life quality brought by science and invention?
"Yes, science gives us the Internet and the like. There is much though, that science fails in. Science alone, if it ruled, would ruin us. Without morals, no laws would be obeyed. Without compassion or emotion, people would become depressed. Without a sense of faith and supernatural security (as humans have always believed in the mystical), people would become even more dangerously depressed."
I'll get to this later... but as I've said, morals don't come from a belief in an all powerful deity.
"Science alone would be catastrophic as a belief system, as would any other one system. Look at catholic Europe a millenium ago. Religion can pacify the people as a whole and individually, offering a peace and presence of mind not seen in science."
Excuse me? Catholic Europe a thousand years ago was hardly at peace... Many consider that time to be the most war mongering period in human history.
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You may think I am, then, defending faith and religion. I am not. What I want both sides in this argument to see is that YOU ARE BOTH WRONG. No one among us is correct about the state of things. I guarantee it. Honestly what are the chances, especially with such diverse beliefs across the world, that you belief is right? Nill. I doubt any human being has ever known the truth, if there even are such things as human beings. Science-lovers, you are nothing more than religionists. Fundamentalists, the scientists you loathe are a mirror for your own misguiding. The fallacies you point out, creationists, in the the evolution arguments are as poignant against creationism as evolutionism."
Belief systems are not all equal. I'll go in more with response to your next paragraph. Please, where are the fallacies in the evolution argument?
"If there is one thing I have observed in my short (but ever longer) life, it is this: No matter how indestructible a belief system may seem, there is always some counterpoint that seems completely to deconstruct the theory. We as humans, in beliefs we espouse, are totally 100% self-contradictory. I have reached the conclusion after a while that believing anything in the normal sense of belief means you merely have to overlook a lot of glaring errors. There is no perfectly constructed belief system. All of you who believe anything, you must know this if you think about it. You don't have to admit, if you don't want, to save face, but if you honestly give it a fair share of unbiased thought, you will realize that whatever belief you hold is probably wrong, and that everyone else is probably wrong as well."
This is where you and science absolutely agree. The scientific method is based upon the fact that we are always getting new data about the naturalistic world and that many times it falsifies the theories we have taken for true for centuries. But unlike religion with a static bible, science doesn't falter and deny the new evidence, rather it discards it's old theories and manufactures new or improves upon old theories so that we once again have an adequate picture of how the universe works. If our current science is found to be false, than science simply revises itself. This is not proof that science is completely variable and can't be trusted, it rather shows that science adjusts itself so we have increasing orders of magnitudes of accuracy and precision in predictions and measurements. It's not a static belief system, because it's not a belief system. It's objective, makes no value judgements, and is absolutely willing to correct itself in the face of conflicting evidence. This is not religion, this puts it a step above religion.
Now if religion doesn't give us our morals, where do we get our morals? Well the fact is that science already offers an answer to this question, that does not require the invocation of a supernatural being, but rather has grounding in our natural and importantly observable world. If we can answer a fundamental question using what we know to exist, then why should we resort to considering what we don't know for sure to exist? That sort of thinking doesn't give us airplanes or cell phones or elevators...
Morality is, to put it quite bluntly, a socio-evolutionary strategy. Evolutionary imperative forces individuals to attempt to maximize their reproductive success, simply because those individuals who do so pass on the genetic material that made them reproductively successful. Many animals are social, because they all gain much more individual reproductive success when in a social group than they do if they were to go it alone. To be successful social animals, you can't go around killing each other, because that is no society and no longer is there more individual reproductive success. But animals who had genetic predisposition to helping each other out, found that they could form successful social groups and were very reproductively successful, passing on this genetic predisposition. Of course, there is always room in this strategy for exploiters. For example, a rapist could invade such a society and impregnate all it's women and would that not increase the rapists reproductive success? Yes it would, but if the society instituted law, and went forward and killed the rapist and perhaps even killed the rapist's babies then the rapist loses out evolution-wise. It would be those who either had moral natures, or had natures which allowed them to quickly absorb a societies morals that allowed them to live successfully within a society and reap the great evolutionary benefit of living in a society as opposed to going lone ranger. All laws and morals were created to perpetuate the successful and stable society such that it's constituents could continue to reap the benefits of mass co-operation. No single person could single-handedly maintain the lifestyle we have, because our improved lives and consequent reproductive success are a result of the products reaped from society and co-operation.
GFDT last call!
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