Christian Persecution vs Persecuted Christians

[Maxperson]

What is a "scientific reason"?

A reason based in the scientific process.

Science does not generally assume reasons - a scientist posits a hypothesis, and then *tests* it to see if it holds up under scrutiny. And then they test some other way. And then other people find yet more ways to test. Putting something to a barrage of tests to see if hit holds water is pretty much the opposite of assuming a thing to be true.

And even when something seems to pass all the barrage of tests, it is still subject to revision later - see Newton and Einstein as an example.

If there is a "belief" at in all of this, it is in the idea that this process of testing, revising, and testing again eventually gets you closer and closer to a accurate picture of what's going on. A belief that has the result of all the technology that is part of your life seems like a pretty reasonable thing to hold, rather than something hypocritical

While a particular scientists may become dogmatic about a given theory or hypothesis, science, overall and in the long run, is not. You are mis-characterizing science.

Some things such as the big bang cannot be proven in any way. You cant test that theory for truth. You can only look at how things are working (or we think they're working) in the universe and see if it contradicts the theory or not.

 

[Ryujin]

Scale is irrelevant when it comes to hypocrisy. Either you are being hypocritical or you are not. You don't get to make assumptions, even if those assumption are based on rigorous testing and then call others out for assumptions of any kind. You can disagree with them, but if you put them down for assuming you are a hypocrite.

It's not hypocritical and you certainly can call out the assumptions of others, when the very process behind your own assumptions calls for the constant and consistent attempts to disprove your own. THAT is science.

 

[Umbran]

A reason based in the scientific process.

Reasons, in and of themselves, are not based in the scientific process. The Universe is what it is. Its operation is based in itself. It would be what it is whether or not primates or any other organisms anywhere developed science. The action of a cell is not *based on* the microscope - the microscope allows you see the actions of the cell.

The scientific process (which is a glib phrase, but I'll allow it for the moment) is a method for *finding* reasons. Science is merely a set of tools and processes we mere mortals with our limited sensory apparatus and cognitive quirks have to finding out what the Universe is and how it operates.

Some things such as the big bang cannot be proven in any way.

Depends what you call "proof". In the same sense as a logical mathematical proof? No, but then nothing outside mathematics can be so proven, and no practical scientists claims to prove anything in that sense. In the more colloquial sense of having tons of evidence for it, and making predictions which turn out to happen in reality, however, science does pretty well.

You cant test that theory for truth. You can only look at how things are working (or we think they're working) in the universe and see if it contradicts the theory or not.

And, if the action of the universe contradicts the theory, we know the theory is wrong, now don't we? If the action of the universe *fails* to contradict the theory, and the theory clearly, measurably, and repeatedly predicts what actually happens in many ways, then why shouldn't we figure we are onto something?

And, you can do slightly more than what you say above. A good working theory has the following characteristics:

1) It is consistent with what you already know - all currently known phenomena are covered by the theory.
2) It is consistent with or predicts phenomena that are not covered by other theories.

For the basics, Einsteinian gravity reduces to Newtonian gravity. However, Newtonian gravity doesn't predict the precession of the orbit of Mercury, doesn't properly predict the lensing of light around the Sun, and doesn't handle gravitational redshift of light. Einsteinian gravity does all those better than Newtonian mechanics does. And it isn't that Einstein just cobbled together something that predicts the results of known experiments of his time - there's tests that he couldn't make in his own time, that have been done since - when a theory predicts phenomena that its own creator didn't consider, and fits old phenomena to levels of accuracy and precision unavailable to in the time of the original formulation, that's rather more than, "We can see if the universe contradicts the theory."

 

[Maxperson]

It's not hypocritical and you certainly can call out the assumptions of others, when the very process behind your own assumptions calls for the constant and consistent attempts to disprove your own. THAT is science.

Ahh, so you think it's okay to be a hypocrite if you believe that your reasons for assuming are better than the other guy's. Sorry, that's not the way it works. You don't get a pass just because you think your way is superior. Heck, you don't get a pass even if your way really is superior. If you do something and call someone out for doing the same thing, the reasons you do it are irrelevant. You are a hypocrite.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Moreover, they *cannot* be given that kind of scrutiny. If you posit an omnipotent, omniscient deity, then when dealing with a religious belief, any potential evidence contradicting the belief can be dismissed with, "That's what God wants it to look like." Religious beliefs are fundamentally non-falsifiable - there is no test or data that can disprove them because one can always, "play the God card."

Yep.

 

[Ryujin]

Ahh, so you think it's okay to be a hypocrite if you believe that your reasons for assuming are better than the other guy's. Sorry, that's not the way it works. You don't get a pass just because you think your way is superior. Heck, you don't get a pass even if your way really is superior. If you do something and call someone out for doing the same thing, the reasons you do it are irrelevant. You are a hypocrite.

Nice deflection. Not simply assuming that your own beliefs are correct IS superior and building a logical structure that begins with the belief that your assumptions are incorrect, then continues to test them as more knowledge is obtained, is far from hypocritical.

 

[Maxperson]

Nice deflection. Not simply assuming that your own beliefs are correct IS superior and building a logical structure that begins with the belief that your assumptions are incorrect, then continues to test them as more knowledge is obtained, is far from hypocritical.

Prove it. You need to prove that assuming is not assuming, since that's what your arguments are effectively claiming. You are saying that because science assumes in a different way than religion, that it is not really assuming. That's the only way it wouldn't be hypocritical, because if science's assumptions were assumptions, they would be hypocrites for getting down on religion for making assumptions.

And the only deflections going on here are yours. Superiority doesn't matter. Scale doesn't matter. How you go about coming to your assumptions doesn't matter. Stop deflecting and prove that science isn't being hypocritical by engaging in "Do what I say, not what I do."

 

[Ryujin]

Prove it. You need to prove that assuming is not assuming, since that's what your arguments are effectively claiming. You are saying that because science assumes in a different way than religion, that it is not really assuming. That's the only way it wouldn't be hypocritical, because if science's assumptions were assumptions, they would be hypocrites for getting down on religion for making assumptions.

And the only deflections going on here are yours. Superiority doesn't matter. Scale doesn't matter. How you go about coming to your assumptions doesn't matter. Stop deflecting and prove that science isn't being hypocritical by engaging in "Do what I say, not what I do."

Yup, if I needed any proof that walking away from this the first time was the right decision, I've just had that decision supported. Up is down and black is white and I am the walrus. Goo goo g'joob.

 

[Kramodlog]

Right, because no one believes that the big bang happened. It's hypocrisy for people to slam religions for believing religious things based on observations, but support themselves for believing things based on observations.

You actually saw god!? Does it have a gender?

 

[Umbran]

You need to prove that assuming is not assuming...

"Have you stopped beating your wife?" The question has an implicit assumption of an action taking place that has not happened (wife beating in Groucho's case, science assuming things in your case), and so is nonsensical.

Stop deflecting and prove that science isn't being hypocritical by engaging in "Do what I say, not what I do."

Let us take the Big Bang as an example.

Back in 1920, Einstein's version of the Universe in General Relativity was static - neither growing nor shrinking in time, and having always existed and always would exist. In 1922 and 1923, Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way was not the whole of the Universe, that there were other galaxies outside our own.

In 1927 Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître put forth a model of an expanding universe, based on Einstein's equations. Einstein admitted the math was good, but had issues with the non-static result. In 1929, observations by Edwin Hubble (because of how things got names, a lot of people don't realize the initial theory was Lemaître's, not Hubble's) backed up Lemaître's theory. For many years, there was a great deal of arguing over this - many, including Einstein, were not comfortable with the idea of an expanding Universe, thought Einstein actually encouraged Lemaître to keep working on the theory. In 1948, Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman worked out that if the Universe had once been a small, dense, hot ball, there would be some leftover background radiation to the Universe. The existence of this radiation was discovered in 1964 by Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson at the Crawford Hill location of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel Township, New Jersey (scooping several other groups in so doing).

Since then, the model has been updated several times over.

This is pretty much the poster child for science overall *not* making assumptions. Each step of the development of the model has been accompanied by wrangling, lots of math, and experimental verification, rather than flat assumption of correctness. Yes, today is it taken as likely the best guess we have as to how the Universe came to be - though it is understood there's still stuff about it we don't know. But, there are still a couple of competing theories out there - they either make predictions that don't match observations nearly as well as Big Bang does, or are actually non-falsifiable (either practically of the moment, or outright theoretically).