Wednesday, April 17, 2024

How Dare You Use Science In Arguing For Religion or something to that effect

IF SCIENTISTS WANT to publish their thinking to the general public the general public has a right to use what is said in their thinking about other things.  Religion is certainly not a part of science, it is a separate entity by the formal rules of science which is supposed to not consider many of the matters that religion deals with.  It's kind of funny to complain about using science to support religious belief as one of the lines of modern atheist attack on religion is the criticism of those within religion NOT basing their conclusions on science.  It would seem that's OK with atheists ONLY WHEN THE EXTRA-SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSION IS THE ONE THEY LIKE.  

How can you fault me from doing with science what an equally religious ideology, atheism, does with scientific ideas all the time?  Atheism is no more a legitimate part of science than a belief in God, Jesus, saints, angels, etc.  It is no more capable of supporting that religious idea (anti-religion being no less a religious belief than a belief in religion) than it is a belief in God or gods or any of the other beliefs that might be itemized in a more extensive list.

It's no less legitimate to use the valid findings of science to assert a belief in the intelligent design of life OUTSIDE OF SCIENCE than it is to use valid findings of science to assert a disbelief in an Intelligent Designer.  I haven't used arguments from Michael Behe,  I am sure I'd disagree with him on many things within religion but as long as he's not lying about things, as long as his lines of reasoning from the findings of science are at least as sound as those within conventional science (or more sound, perhaps) what he's doing is intellectually valid.   If it's valid science, I may have my doubts but that would only be a matter of clerical correctness I'm willing to leave to scientists to argue, not of valid intellectual belief just as I choose not to cite him. 

I doubt that Denis Noble would accept all of my conclusions based on what he says, I doubt that James Shapiro or Richard Lewontin or Stephen J. Gould or George Ellis might accept all of my conclusions based on what they say but I know that they probably don't agree with everything an ideological materialist-atheist-true believer in scientism would say about it, either.  Look at how Shaprio and Noble have disagreed with Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins within science and I'm not claiming that my extra-scientific conclusions are scientific but I have every right to base them in valid science and to assert them.  

I don't see my use of science in thinking about free thought and free will and egalitarian democracy or, yes, the intelligent design of life by God as being in any way illegitimate.   And the outcome of my use of science in egalitarian democracy is so much less dangerous than what the materialist-atheists have done with science.  Nazism and Communism are both applications of would-be science in politics, their body counts and rates of oppression and enslavement, alone, dwarf that of the Inquisition which would likely have been far less infamous if it had access to legitimate science. Though it had a rate of acquitting the accused that is far higher than under any self-consciously "scientific" regime of the alleged "enlightenment" period.  Or, indeed, the United States "justice" system under a regime of secular liberal democracy.  The United States will probably soon, if it can't be said to, have already surpassed the execution rate of the infamous Spanish Inquisition in its far longer existence in a far shorter time.*  The actual rate of execution under the Spanish Inquisition is far lower than the popular misunderstanding of history imagines that to have been.  And I doubt anyone of any repute in Catholicism would ever express anything but abhorrence for the it, today.  Though you might find a few ultramontanist, integralist nut cases in the billionaire AstroTurf "traditional Catholic" cult or at Harvard Law School who might, most of even that bunch wouldn't.  

*  Just since 1973  1,584 people have been executed in the U.S.  It's estimated  that between three thousand and five thousand people were executed during the Spanish Inquisition, which, by the way, was conducted under the authority of the Spanish monarchy, not the Church. 

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