A little pabulum for our "scientismificist" friends: The royal road to belief: science.

[Joe Chi Minh]

No surprise there. A large majority of its most innovative thinkers have been passionately Christian (in the case of Einstein, theistic).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/sep/06/science-religion-newton

[Xipe Totec]

1. Nice post, Lucifer n/t

[Joe Chi Minh]

3. I do try to bring some light to your world.

[DeSwiss]

2. The last sentence in the article:

"If there were ever anything that feeds our feeling life and might prompt us towards religious belief it is surely contemporary science."

- Bullshit. Pure and unadulterated bullshit. Religion is not going to be allowed to ease through some fucking side door to try and obtain legitimacy. Not again. Not anymore.

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. What nonsense. How can science get past the fundamental paradoxes?

Paradoxes are "a priori" truths which, in very principle, defy our intelligence.

Of course, a rational scientist of the old Newtonian, reductionist school - though Newton wasn't, himself, a reductionist) - would say that the notion that light had attributes of both waves and particles is oxymoronic.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF MAGIC!

[darkstar3]

5. And just exactly what science have YOU studied?

In your OP, you reference Einstein, who wasn't a theist at all (which you'd know if you'd actually studied his work), and you go even further here to say that science can't get past "the fundamental paradoxes?" The ONLY way we'll ever unlock the secrets of the universe is through science. Period.

And the next time you feel like mocking science in favor of religion, remember this:
Faith: "I don't know how it happened, and there's no way to find out, so it must have been God (or a creator)."
Science: "I don't know how it happened, and there's no way to find out, yet."

In other words, we're not afraid to say "I don't know." In fact, "I don't know" may just be one of the most beautiful phrases in the English language, because it is always followed by the search for knowledge.

[laconicsax]

6. What a load!

"Yet in his quest for objectivity Galileo did unwittingly separate them...thus impoverishing our understanding of nature."

Yeah--demonstrating that the earth moves around the sun really set us back. If only he's shut up and accepted the Bible's account of a flat Earth, surrounded by a firmament that holds the stars and planets we'd be much better off.

"Beauty and subjectivity were arbitrarily banished from the discourse of science."

It isn't arbitrary. If we limit research based on our opinions of how things ought to be, then we end up impeding our ability to learn how things work. Plato's philosophical musings of celestial spheres wound up being taken as 'is' rather than 'ought' and for centuries, people kept trying to prove it right with epicycles and other crap rather than just saying, "this doesn't work, maybe it isn't right."

"The wonders science is now revealing to us are so great they have escaped the boundaries of Galileo's world and bewilder our minds."

I'm confused--these wonders are a result of the scientific objectivity being criticized earlier. Are we supposed to like scientific objectivity or hate it? Jackson seems to be trying to have it both ways.

"Nobody has ever seen, weighed or defined gravity. Newton's belief that it is the pneumatic body of Christ was at least some kind of attempt to say what it is, and nobody has come up with anything better yet."

This is simply false. The string theory hypothesis has a possible explanation of exactly what gravity is and even if it didn't, "the pneumatic body of Christ" is a terrible definition because it doesn't help us understand gravity.

"But we can feel its unfathomable mystery and its glory and we can worship the intelligibility and beauty that it manifests. If there were ever anything that feeds our feeling life and might prompt us towards religious belief it is surely contemporary science."

Yes, worship what you don't understand. Pray to the god of the gaps. Anything that can't currently be explained is automatically divine.

[iris27]

7. Royal road to belief...right, that's why the percentage of non-believers goes up

with each successive level of education achieved: http://sda.berkeley.edu:8080/quicktables/quickoptions.do.

And the figures among scientists specifically are even more skewed against religious belief: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/news/file002.html

A large majority of its most innovative thinkers have been passionately Christian

A little backup for that assertion, please?

And please don't drag Einstein into this; the poor guy just wanted to be left the hell out of religious debate:

"I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being."
- Albert Einstein to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949, quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic magazine, Vol. 5, No. 2

[laconicsax]

8. The claim that the majority were Christian is based on a hope

that the person responding is ignorant of history. Namely that Europe was steadfastly Christian and apostasy was forbidden and often punished.

It's the same as when faithiests use the examples of sacred music by Bach nnd Mozart. They hope that you don't realize that in the 17th century, churches were the biggest employers of musicians/composers and an apostate wouldn't have been in a position to write great works.

[Deep13]

9. Before the last century, at least the pretense of belief was enforced by law.

Who knows what they really thought. So, that pretty much invalidates the test results. As far as Einstein goes, his "religion" was so watered down and generalized that it really cannot be called theistic.