Grassblade wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Of course he can. Whether you believe in science and whether you believe
>> in God are orthogonal. Many scientists are rather devout. It's *because*
>> religion is illogical that this is possible.
> It is? 

Yes. In my experience, it is.

Take, DeCartes, for example. His first step, "I think, therefore I am" 
is logical. His second (or so) step is "I know there is evil, hence 
there must be good" isn't. There could be many kinds of evil, and no 
good. If I have two different geometric objects with different numbers 
of sides, I know they can't both be triangles. But that doesn't mean if 
one isn't a triangle, the other one must be.

> I can only talk about Christianism, but how silly of me to think that
> about 1500 years of Europe's greatest minds would have ironed out the kinks so
> much so that atheists can't think of anything really persuasive to make their
> case. 

Not persuasive to someone already faithful, no. That's kind of the point 
of faith.

Silly of you to think that after 1500 years of Europe's greatest minds, 
you couldn't come up with something to pursuade atheists, either, hmmm?

> Christianism is based on a dogma: God exists. 

Well, yeah. And logically, from one flawed premise, you can get all 
*kinds* of results that aren't isomorphic to reality in any way.

I can base my navigation on a dogma that the earth is flat. Doesn't mean 
I'll get to where I'm going, even tho the greeks worked out all the 
rules for figuring that out were it so.

> All the rest is logically gleaned from the Bible. 

In my experience, if logic conflicts with the statements in the Bible, 
the logic goes out the window.

> Mathematicians use axioms and then derive conclusions
> logically from there. 

Right.

> According to you, then, maths is illogical and irrational
> because it is necessarily based on (unproven) axioms.

No, that isn't what makes religion illogical. That religion is based on 
unsupported axioms just makes its logical conclusions useless. But even 
so, in my experience talking to religious people of all stripes, 
including (as I've described) people who have actually studied to be 
priests from a family of priests, religion is illogical. In the sense 
that if accepted premises lead to unacceptable conclusions, modus ponens 
must be at fault.

>> I'm not sure it would be religion any more. When people got convinced
>> that Thor wasn't real, it wasn't replaced with a different religion.
> It wasn't? They went straight from Norse to atheist? Wow.

By "thor" I meant the whole bit of "gods are responsible for lightning." 
When we found out what actually caused thunder, people didn't say "Oh, 
it wasn't *Thor*, it was *Loki*" or something.

Out of curiousity, given the number of religions that have come and gone 
and are still popping into existence, why do you think yours is the 
right one?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     It's not feature creep if you put it
     at the end and adjust the release date.

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