| yo_john117 said: ... If you still don't believe evolution is a religion after this then there is nothing I can do that will change your mind... |
Were I supposed to change my mind after an article with such pearls as:
And atheism, no less than theism, is a religion! Even doctrinaire-atheistic evolutionist Richard Dawkins admits that atheism cannot be proven to be true.
Of course we can't prove that there isn't a God.
Therefore, they must believe it, and that makes it a religion.
Really? That's simply silly on the epistemologic and logic level.
Let's substitute god with invisible unicorns or the flying spaghetti monster or Osiris. Would not believing in the existence of any of them be an act of religion?
1) Absence of proof is not proof of absence
Dawkins is simply saying that you can't prove the inesistence of something described in abstract as god is, because he's described as an omnipotent being that might escape from all experimental research. Just like you can't prove that the world isn't filled with invisible, immaterial unicorns that never interact with matter or energy in any way. It's an obvious logical assertion. So why don't we need a proof of absence?
2) Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
Occam's razor. Postulating the existence of something because we don't have proofs about its existence or inexistence would populate our reasoning with all kinds of invisible and useless entities.So when is an entity scientifically useless?
It's since Popper - almost a century, guys - that the best value of theories in science is found in how much they are falsifiable. The more experiments you can conduct to try and disprove a theory, the more truth value it can provide. The value in this sense of the invisible god hypothesis is equal to the value of the invisible unicorns one, and that is zero.
Thus, not believing in something complicated, unneeded and unproven is not religion - at best it's a stance about ideas that others tackle with religion.
It's simply a clean, baseline scientific phylosophical position. I really wish you'd have answered the gist of the matter instead of quoting that jumbled mess.
