filtherton

I agree with what you said here, if that's any clarification. Maybe "too much faith" is the wrong way to put it. How would you describe someone who thinks that hammers only work on one kind of nail?

I'm working from the premise that anything, when pursued religiously, can become a religion. If you'd prefer a different term, let me know.

Do you see anything problematic with making the claim "very few people believe that they are being illogical' and then following it up by lamenting the people whose logic doesn't line up with yours? What makes you so sure that you aren't one of the folks who isn't erroneously presuming to be behaving logically?

That's my point. I agree with you that logic does simply work, and there is nothing religious in how it does its thing. The religious aspect comes in when certain folks co-opt the word "logic" as a means of attempting to justify purely philosophical preferences. To paraphrase atheism as the pinnacle of logic: "Oooh la la, look at me, it's not that I prefer my perspective to be based on scientifically verifiable information, it's that I'm, like, so logical about everything."

The claim is often made in these discussions that atheists are right because they are logical and that religious folk are wrong because they aren't logical. It is also true that ensuing discussions of what logic actually is show a rather wide divide between the people who think its relevant and the people who don't. In any case, if one defines the word "logical" as being "any position which agrees with mine" (which seems to be an implicit belief in the "theism is wrong because it is illogical" perspective) then one is using logic in a religious sense.

And whether you feel oppressed by religious folk is irrelevant to anything I'm talking about. Some folk might call it a straw man.

From my understanding, Dawkins quotes religious ideas to discredit them, but in doing so fails to show an adequate understanding of their significance. Whether his general criticisms of theism are correct or not, he kind of shoots himself in the foot by overstating the case.

I think it extends from a common mistake in criticisms of theism, in that it attempts to discredit theism in general by discrediting how it is practiced by certain groups. If one's goal is to discredit theism in general, it seems like it should be of little practical value to discredit a subset of people who practice it.

Makes me glad I'm not a famous intellectual, though if you read the works of Carl Friedrich Gauss, Richard Feynman, or Euler you kind of get a good idea where I'm coming from.

I know. Anyone who gets their science from the Discovery Channel doesn't know the half.

Certainly there are some religious claims which can be verified through scientific means. Science can readily verify that god isn't a visible three foot tall hobgoblin that perches on George Bush's head during press conferences.

There are limitations to what science can say, however, and theism thrives just beyond these limitations. So while it may be right to claim that by making certain claims, some religious statements naturally avail themselves to scientific inquiry, the idea that all religious statements about reality can be subjugated by scientific inquiry isn't itself all that well reflected in reality.

It is difficult to devise an experiment to reveal the nature of an omnipotent being who doesn't necessarily want its nature revealed. As far as debunking the central ideas of theism directly, science is useless because as far as the scientific process is concerned, theism doesn't play fair.

And I'm pretty sure that there are some creationists who do believe that their god planted evidence.

I'm fairly certain that everyone's reality is in some respects a rationalization of what one wants. That being said, your particular interest in the nature of religion is immaterial here; not to be flip, but it isn't relevant to anything I'm talking about.

I won't argue with this, though I would extend recognition to humanity in general. Make the claim that religion is rational and you get a pretty good idea about the number of confused and insecure logicians...