ant wrote:Thanks for your post, Robert. Just one quick question:
Evolution is completely mechanistic. Positing any non-mechanistic factors is primitive illogical thinking that fails to engage with reality.
Have you addressed my initial questions/comments regarding the origin of life?
Although your argument demonstrates mechanistic evolutionary processes, why does it not commit a genetic fallacy of irrelevant conclusion? We must be careful not to rely too heavily on fallacious tactics.
ant wrote:It's fascinating to me how fervent militant atheists are with their feverish insistence that there is no god. It is nearly identical to religious fanaticism, something they also claim to detest. It's really quite funny when you think about it. As I've stated before, when science becomes dogma, it is no better than religious dogma.
Hi Ant, this is all good grist to the mill. I have faith in science, so you are right in my case, just in your observation that there is a similarity in the certainty displayed between some forms of militant atheism and religion.
However, the big difference is that militant atheism is compatible with everything we see, whereas theism is incompatible with everything we see. So dogmatism in science, which means regarding ideas such as the theory of evolution as necessarily true, is actually far better, more informative and more accurate than any religious dogma, simply because it is true. Far better to insist on correct ideas than to insist on false ones. Moral reasoning should start with evidence.
As to the supposed 'genetic fallacy' arising from the observation that science has not been able to create life, yes the origin of life is an unknown. The possibilities are that when you have the ingredients for life on a planet, it will eventually happen (scientific evolution), that life is seeded from elsewhere in the universe (panspermia), or that an old man in the sky, egged on by Jesus at his right hand, said 'let there be light' and behold it was good, evening and morning, the first day (theism).
Looking at the history of each of these ideas, theism sought to explain creation before humanity had the scientific knowledge to formulate a more plausible account. The fact that we cannot yet explain how life started does not make theistic explanations more plausible than atheist explanations.
You certainly have a flourish when it comes to rhetoric, ant. Just in one short paragraph, we get "fascinating .. fervent militant atheists .. feverish insistence .. nearly identical to.. fanaticism.. quite funny .. when science becomes dogma"
Sadly, your attack on science is entirely free of content, except the observation that the efforts of science to avoid faith are futile. To argue with religious evangelists with their rigid certainty and arrogant moral vanity, science has to adopt the same attitude of faith, saying that scientific knowledge is absolutely correct while religious error is absolutely false. Scientific purists see this as degrading the method of science, but politically it is necessary, simply because expressing doubt allows unscrupulous opponents to manipulate the public.
It is not that religion is meaningless, because we can still salvage some symbolic value in Genesis and other texts, but that anyone who says religious claims may be literally true when they conflict with science is insane.