The New "Religion Vs Science" Thread

I tried to show you just how much I care...

Why those in science seek with such a passion to diminish humanity and its condition, humans with their incredible potential, is beyond me and I'll say again a product of the romantic sensibility. Science + romanticism = self negation. Sad and silly.

Paul, that is a straw man argument. Are you sure "those in science seek to diminish humanity"? Consider those in science who are fascinated with humanity and wish instead to observe and study it. Wouldn't you agree that there are scientists who study love, war, sex, art, and yes even religion? You can find a crazy scientist just as you can find religious zealots who wish to damn you to hell. But of course not all who claim to be scientists or religious zealots will have those same passions.

Even my quote above re "just" "balls of meat" is not from a science type but from Ben Shapiro, a widely listened to religious type.

Good grief!

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

    Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Percy Bysshe Shelley

But if evolution is true, that is his (Ben Shapiro's) attitude. Is it not?

Let's take the scientific materialist worldview at its very base:

The human mind is capable of comprehending the infinite.

Some one please tell me what the hell does scale have to do with importance?

Straw man argument? No, simply an observation of opinions on this and the mind thread. Perhaps I should have qualified with "those here on this thread," since, no doubt there are many in science that don't succumb to the notion we are but dust specks riding around on a dust speck no more valuable than a bacteria, accidents of evolutionary processes in a vast indifferent universe, doomed to end as a species and therefore ultimately irrelevant in our actions and production. A really pathetic way to think of the miraculous structure we call the human mind.

Science is not a negation or diminishment.

But you continue to obfuscate or ignore my points. Why is that?

Given that it sets up a competition, or at least a comparison, one has to expect that posters on the thread will weigh in where they think, and use rhetorical devices to advance their argument.