

Why Scientists Can't Be Atheist - melvinmt
http://melvinmt.com/93/why-scientists-cant-be-atheist

======
dalke
"The better word is that they believe in atheism"

This is a classic misdirection. The word "belief" means many things. Do you
believe that Australia exists? (That's the classic response.) Do you believe
that the North Pole exists? You've probably not been to both. Is this belief
the same as the belief in a god?

When I say "classic", I mean that Russell wrote about it in the 1950s, saying:

> I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an
> atheist. I do not think the existence of the Christian God any more probable
> than the existence of the Gods of Olympus or Valhalla. To take another
> illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars
> a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this
> sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the
> Christian God just as unlikely.

The "any more probable" part is key. You wrote "specifically deny that a
higher life form exists." That is a strawman view because that's not
scientific claim. What atheists will often say is that the evidence is lacking
which suggests that a higher life form exists. Some might ask you what 'higher
life' means - how do you know one when you see one? Could you tell the
difference between a higher life form and a visiting alien from Tau Ceti?

The burden is not on science to disprove, it is on you to provide evidence.

"A scientist is constantly in search of the Truth"

That's not true. We have no way to recognize the Truth if we were staring it
in the face. The goal of science is to reduce doubt, and the first law of
science is, you are the easiest person to fool.

The second law might be to know what people have done before. Your essay
follows well-worn ruts, based on a misunderstanding of what "belief" means,
and of the objections of atheism to a religious interpretation of the
universe.

Read, for example, more about the spectrum of theistic probability. Many
atheists, including Richard Dawkins, regard themselves as a "De facto atheist.
Very low probability, but short of zero. "I don't know for certain but I think
God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not
there." Fewer are a "Strong atheist. "I know there is no God, with the same
conviction as Jung knows there is one.""

Your objections only hold for a "strong atheist", and your thesis means that
you really need to learn more about the tenants of deism, theism, atheism,
agnosticism, and even anti-theism.

------
venomsnake
Linkbait. I am an atheist and have done more than my fair share of
experiments. Also scientists that I know are generally agnostic/atheist bunch.
They just don't think that god is important or relevant. Whenever we were
pretty drunk to not have more valuable things to do than discuss theology the
general consensus was that 1. God probably does not exist. 2 if it exist it
has left the universe or left it to its own devices. 3. In the case of deistic
power that is influencing and interfering with humanity on regular basis -
with all that wide spread misery in the world - we will just beat the crap out
of it when we find it.

Science does not search for the grand truth - just knowledge and understanding
of the world. The truth is flexible and always obeys reality.

------
bediger4000
Bad article. The giveaway is "The better word is that they believe in
atheism." Massive strawman. The strawman also presupposes that some body of
doctrine called "atheism" exists, in the same sense that "Roman Catholicism"
or "Greek Orthodox" or "Southern Baptist" bodies of doctrine exist.

Also, the article proposes a "God of the cracks" argument. We haven't found
The Truth yet, so God might exist somewhere in what we just don't know so far.

