If any of you are going to be in the neighborhood of CalTech around the 4th of October, you might want to sign up for the big Origins conference — it definitely has some great speakers. Sean Carroll, Leonard Susskind, Paul Davies, (wait…what’s with all the physicists?), Donald Prothero and Christof Koch (OK, that’s better) will be presenting there. The late afternoon will feature the comedy stylings of Hugh Ross, crazy creationist, getting spanked by Victor Stenger. The evening will be topped off by a visit from Mr. Deity — how can you miss that?
One disappointment in the schedule to me is the afternoon panel discussing “Does science make belief in god obsolete?” While the four speakers lined up are interesting people, they aren’t the kind of people who will get it into a good brawl over the issue — I predict that the answer they’ll deliver is a waffly “no”, emphasis on the waffle. Maybe some of you readers can show up in the audience and add a little godless fire to the proceedings.
There’s a remote chance I’ll be able to make it, but it’s pretty low.
FSM makes anti-pasta obsolete.
Common sense makes God obsolete, not science.
A theme usually omitted in the posts on this site (at least since I got addicted & started reading every day) is the possible adaptive value (for humans) of religion. Some scientists are looking into this now (David Sloan Wilson being one of them: religious heretic because he explicitly states that religions involve false beliefs, and in trouble on the scientific side because he argues in favour of group selection being a stronger force than is commonly accepted today).
Does science make the belief in god obsolete?
Well, not unless it supplies a system that supplants any adaptive value religion has. It would be nice if such a system was reality-based, of course.
(If you think religion is maladaptive, then I think you have a job to do explaining why there are so many.)
Isn’t Paul Davies heavy on the woo? I’m sure I remember him being one that ‘they’ turn to when they want to refute scientists who support atheism.
If you think cancer is maladaptive, then I think you have a job to do explaining why it is so common.
Religion is the unfortunate by-product of the evolution of human mental processes. We benefited from having brains that force us to seek answers; however, when there were things we couldn’t find answers for, we had to come up with something to stave off the resultant gnawing doubt.
Hey presto! Invisible superfriends.
Fortunately, some of us have moved past attempting to answer these questions with these substandard supernatural explanations. Unfortunately, we remain a minority.
What does ‘adaptive value’ mean, and how would it apply to religion?
Stenger is pathetic. Not that he can’t make Ross look equally pathetic, but Stenger’s “arguments” are without merit.
And I’d be willing to bet that most physicists -the creme de la creme of the scientific community- would agree that science and faith are not mutually exclusive.
It is the weird arrogance of biologists that insist upon this.
Perhaps suffering from a bit of “short-man’s syndrome” here, Little Paul?
Isn’t Paul Davies heavy on the woo? I’m sure I remember him being one that ‘they’ turn to when they want to refute scientists who support atheism.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/07/03/paul_davies/
Egads.
Dang, PZ, I wish you had time to read that book I sent you. And, uh, that you’d like it. :D
Dude. “Caltech”.
OT,
Snopes has verified a letter from a person who knows Palin, informing us of Palin’s dubious personality traits. Including her attempt at banning certain books from the city libraries. I’d be very interested to see if any of those books were Origin of the Species
@nobody
I resent this. I’m sure even physicists resent it. Despite generous amounts of teasing amongst scientists of different disciplines, we don’t seriously think of there being any kind of intellectual hierarchy between the disciplines. Between individual scientists, sure, there are differing levels of prestige and competence, but that’s about it. All science is valuable to the expansion of human knowledge.
I agree, but you’re still a dick.
You have yet to present us with something that demonstrates any level of intellectual superiority to utter such fucktardishness (sure it’s a word, it applies to your statement quite nicely). You are indeed nobody.
yes, you are right, cancer is common, and less likely to be evolutionarily adaptive than many things (though there are diseases that do have some adaptive value, sickle-cell anemia being one, but there are probably others – some claims are made for hemachromatosis, for instance). But I’m unsure that even cancer has no evolutionary value at all. (Value to whom? Or what? Viruses? Let’s face it, biology is messy).
And religions seem to share a lot of features in common with cancer, so your metaphor is apt there, too.
Perhaps I should have said “nearly universal” instead of “common”. Cancer has an incidence rate of, what, 30% of the population? Age-structured with fewer cancers before the reproductive years end, too. But the incidence of religion in societies seems higher than that.
Religious societies seem to survive better than non-religious ones. I have little data to support that claim – but the relative historical paucity of secular societies points that way. It seems worth investigating, anyway.
Time to read some more of John Wilkins’ posts on the subject over at Evolving Thoughts, I guess.
What bothers most scientists (myself included) about religions is the blatant falsity of every religion they encounter. Other people are bothered by hypocrisy. Then there is parasitism. If a religious “leader” provides nothing and only takes collections, then that’s what he or she is, sure. And the enormous expense of churches, and the huge opportunity cost of mal-education. And on and on.
But religion (any religion) seems to provide some benefits (natural, real, non-magic benefits) to its adherents. These have to offset the parasitism if the society is to survive. Very few people seem to look at religion this way. And if religion provides benefits to its adherents, and has done so in our evolutionary past, then it’s possible that we have evolved in a way to take advantage of those benefits.
yes, I know these are large claims, and unlikely to find support on the religious side. But it seems to me a legitimate scientific question: how did religion evolve, and what benefits (if any) does it give to its adherents?
there’s the Cectic answer, of course:
http://cectic.com/150.html
Personally, I’d love to see a Church of the Natural World (n.b. “The Church of Reality” is taken :-) erected on the rubble of supernatural religions, in an attempt to reap any such natural religious benefit; but I think that’s a forlorn hope.
If religion has evolved (like language, like music, like mathematics) as a human social behavior, then it’s unlikely to be overthrown by rational argument (or even a short war). A better hope is for some church to evolve away from the supernatural, and be widely taken up. This may be happening.
I don’t think most physicists would agree that science and faith are compatible. Not in my experience as a physicist, in any case. Sean Carroll is also someone you should read.
While there are a lot of smart people doing physics, there are a lot of smart people doing biology, linguistics, and, well, just about every intellectual pursuit.
Rob C.: Have you read Dennett’s_Breaking the Spell_? It contains some interesting ideas on the origins of religion, including adaption and others.
You don’t seem to differentiate between helpful adaptions and side effects of helpful adaptions. Sickle-cell anemia is _not_ adaptive. It’s a side effect of something that is. A particular optical illusion might affect nearly 100% of the population, but it’s _not_ adaptive. It’s a side effect. Dennett considers the possibility that religion is much the same – a side effect of our generally useful agent-detection device.
I plan to go. We have been discussing this over on http://richarddawkins.net and the subject of John Templeton Foundation funding has come up. I am hoping that Michael Shermer will post something to clarify that part.
Just to rub it in: Religion and science have the same root — human curiosity, human ability and willingness to speculate, human lack of ability to deal with knowing that we know nothing. Religion started entirely within, to use Gould’s terminology, the magisterium of science.
That’s why atheism was so difficult to reach and sustain before science had been invented and had started getting results. It had to basically reject inference.
I never heard of misterdeity before. Excellent YouTube videos. In one video Jesus complains about having to be dead for 3 days, and he asks Mr. Deity why doesn’t he get executed instead.
It’s a byproduct of the ability of cells to proliferate. What evolutionary value could it have? How does cancer make you have more surviving children!?!
That’s called stabilizing selection against cancer.
Do you know how many of our inbuilt limitations have as their only advantage the avoidance of cancer? For example the inability of mammals to regrow lost limbs or to have another number than 7 neck vertebrae (the three exceptions all have a very low metabolism and therefore a lower cancer risk).
You have it backwards. Nonreligious societies were impossible to build until recently because just so little was known and people felt they had to stuff something into the gaps.
Rob C.w
You are conflating “belief in supernatural explanations,” i.e., “god(s),” “reincarnation,” “fate,” or “The Force” with “religion” when they are affiliated but quite different concepts.
Whether science, or anything else, will make “supernatural explanations / god” obsolete” is a very different question from “will science make religion obsolete.
Until people take the effort to distinguish between “god” and “religion,” discussions about either are not likely to go very far.
Is that what you call it? Awwwwwwwww. That’s cute. And so honest too.
Why is it Sean Carroll the physicist speaking and not Sean Carroll the evo devo biologist? Maybe the Skeptic Society just got confused.
Rob C. wrote:
I think it’s fair to say religion did provide benefits to its adherents (those who it didn’t execute or condemn to death through and number of its more illogical demands; human sacrifice, for example, can’t really be considered of much benefit to the person under the knife) but that ties back to what I wrote earlier, and what several other posters have restated – that it satisfied intellectual curiosity.
This was especially important for those in power, because to be considered worthy to rule one has to be able to answer questions.
Even more significant is that, if one wishes to retain power in a unequal society (feudal, for example) it helps to have an explanation for why one small group lives in a palace and everyone else gets a mud hut to share with livestock and the plague. Divine Right of Kings, anyone?
I can’t argue that religion hasn’t benefited human society in some ways – and, since we can’t change the past we might as well just move on and not dwell on it anymore. But that isn’t to say that there’s any reason to retain it. Flint-knapping was a handy skill, but as soon as metal became an option, banging rocks with other rocks to get sharp edges became just a little redundant – just like religion is today.
MTran: I view religion as anything not evidence-based. What’s your definition?
The cognoscenti write “Caltech” as one word without an internal capital.
Now you know.
I don’t know about any of the rest of you, but when I have a piercing abdominal pain, I don’t ask the medical practitioner about it, I go find a physicist.
Surely their intricate knowledge of how mathematics relates to unseen particles and grand forces is enough to help them diagnose my ruptured spleen in time to save me!
You know, Koch is a biophysicist. His book Biophysics of Computation is one of the few good physics-oriented neuroscience texts.
Mtran: yes, I wasn’t clearly distinguishing the notion of a supernatural god from the associated structures we call religion. A notion of a supernatural god might not be necessary for a religion (vide some flavors of Buddhism, as discussed in Owen Flanagan’s book “The Really Hard Problem”). I’d be happy with a purely naturalistic “religion”, where no supernatural aspects were associated. Would it fill all roles (all possibly good roles, that is) of the supernatural religions? I don’t know. Does this common but strictly speaking illogical conflation of god with religion make my post off-topic? Maybe a little, but it’s related.
David M: Cancer isn’t just a byproduct. Some of it is viral. Some of it is genetic. We don’t understand cancer well at all (better every year; in particular your comments re limb-regrowth and vertebral re-growth were new to me, thank you). All I meant was that I’d not bet very much that cancer (or some aspects of it) couldn’t have adaptive value. I was surprised to learn, for example, that a predisposition to diabetes can increase the chances that you’ll live (in an ice age) long enough to have children. Might not some (other) kinds of increased fertility come at a price of an increased risk of cancer? Might that be adaptive even so? That’s not to say cancer *per se* has adaptive value. In the case of religion, this level of the analogy suggests that religion arises purely as a byproduct of something useful. Maybe. Charon raises this as Dennett’s argument, with the “something useful” being an ability for agent detection.
But the competing hypothesis that some natural aspects of religion have adaptive value for groups of humans (and the individuals that comprise them) seems to me to be worth testing.
You (David M) claim nonreligious societies were impossible to build. I agree that seems true, but I disagree with your claimed rationale, that people just “felt they had to stuff something into the gaps”. That’s unsatisfactory, and doesn’t explain (for example) violent punishment of apostates, which an evolutionary theory of religion does: if religion has any natural value, then it behooves the group to enforce compliance, and one would expect agents for enforcing compliance to evolve. This kind of “punisher” evolution is seen in other social animals. Why not in humans?
Charon: yes, I have read Dennet’s “Breaking the Spell” recently; he mentions David Sloan Wilson and points out that DSW has not yet convinced his fellow biologists to reconsider group selection. An excellent book, I agree.
Regarding sickle-cell anemia, it’s a matter of semantics. The disease, as a byproduct of a debilitating condition, confers some protection from malaria, and (probably) allows people carrying the recessive gene to reproduce, if not preferentially then at least on a more level playing field, in areas where malaria is endemic. Is it adaptive? Yeah, I think so, but I can see that not everyone would agree. “Helpful” adaptations may not be so helpful in all situations. And co-opting byproducts is a significant theme in evolution!
BTW I can recommend Carl Zimmer’s “Parasite Rex” for more on malaria and on sickle-cell anemia.
Wowbagger: I wish I could knap flints! But yeah it doesn’t seem too handy nowadays…
But here’s a rephrasing of something you said:
Has science made religion redundant?
I think this is a better question than the “obsolete god” one. After all, we’re now talking about something that actually exists. There’s some hope of a definitive answer, although sharp experiments might be unethical.
You seem to think religion is redundant. As a way to explain the natural world, I agree.
Is that the only function of religion?
Rob C: of course the punisher meme would evolve and attach itself to a memeplex like religion. If you need religion to justify your control of society, you’ll develop the punisher meme yourself.
Also, the sickle-cell allele is adaptive in that it prevents malaria, but not as adaptive as a similar allele that doesn’t cause anemia, but still protects against malaria, because it also has detrimental effects.
I share the skepticism that religion provides adaptive advantages, but I think Pharyngula’s excellent discussions give too little consideration to the real benefits many people derive from religion, despite religion’s lack of basis in reality.
To begin with, people suffering mental or physical anguish clearly derive comfort from the idea that their suffering has meaning in some grander scheme or some payoff in an afterlife. The fact that their belief isn’t based on reality doesn’t prevent it from giving a kind of comfort, any more than the effectiveness of placebos is negated by their lack of active ingredients.
Members of religious communities benefit from the social contacts they find there, in ways ranging from simple friendships, to aid in times of need, to help provided by the network of members. Those of us who live outside religious communities often feel the lack of these benefits: I suspect this is what motivates many Unitarians.
In addition, religion makes people feel good. They may occasionally experience transcendent emotions that they attribute to connection to the supernatural. They may derive pleasure from the belief that they are part of a special group, favored by their deity. They may enjoy the ceremonies and traditions that characterize their religion.
Those of us who think beliefs are better when based on reality should recognize that persuading religious believers to give up their delusions may come with costs to them. Various commenters here have acknowledged having to undergo emotional adjustment after giving up the religion in which they were raised. Consider Julia Sweeney’s famous monologue, Letting Go of God, as an example.
I’d love to see some compassionate discussion of this subject.
Rob C.
As someone who resisted the mild religious indoctrination I was subjected to well before I learned there was any science to provide alternative answers, I can say that I, personally, haven’t replaced religion with science.
What I wrote above isn’t suggesting that science has replaced religion; it’s more that it allows us to understand why our ancestors felt the need to believe in supernatural beings. The evolution of those beliefs into the complex sociopolitical structures we call religions has a lot more to do with power than it does with the formalisation of beliefs.
Not that that wasn’t done with good intentions – at least some of the religious leaders of today probably have a genuine belief that they’re helping people avoid eternal damnation – but once the unscrupulous saw an opportunity for personal gain (wealth, power etc.), it became a lot more complex.
A lot of what religion teaches us is good – morals, altruism etc. – but it’s only a facade. The positive aspects of religion are still available to us, even if we discard the supernatural origins. A few posters here mention the quasi-theistic Unitarian Universalist churches, which combine many of the key aspects of a Christian church – community, collectivity, friendship – without the nonsense of an invisible friend, or the sheer obscenity of the crucifixion/resurrection or eternal damnation.
I’m all for retaining religion – but only as a field of study for historians. We can’t downplay its importance, but we can take what we need from it and discard that which we don’t – that which is, to be frank, holding humanity back and causing many societies great harm.
Basically, you don’t need God to be good.
LateAddition I agree with you that there are people who couldn’t cope without religion; it’s a great source of consternation for me because I sit it as a huge barrier to the eventual allocation of religion to the annals of history. But that doesn’t change the fact it can be done without – the analogy is often that heroin (or other drugs) make people feel good; does that mean we shouldn’t encourage them to give them up, even if they are ‘functioning’ addicts?
[Cut and reposted from Bad Astronomy.]
Yawn.
That explains it.
Btw, wonder what rationalization got Sean Carroll to overcome his opinions about the TF? (IIRC he rejected to apply for one of their “religions is compatible with science” grants.) But yes, he is good.
D’oh! Preview is you friend:
[Cut and reposted from Bad Astronomy.]
Yawn.
That explains it.
Btw, wonder what rationalization got Sean Carroll to overcome his opinions about the TF? (IIRC he rejected to apply for one of their “religions is compatible with science” grants.) But yes, he is good.
I got the impression from the conference page that the Templeton was co-sponsoring only the afternoon panel discussion, in which Carroll is not participating. Which also explains why it’s not going to go after religion with any teeth.
Hugh Ross will get creamed. I ought to send along a few choice quotes from his last book to Victor Stenger.
I hope this will be taped!
@ nobody:
You’ll loose – nearly all of theoretical physicists are atheists. And most atheists recognize the difficulties in such a reconciliation.
More importantly, IIRC statistics says that when people becomes scientists they move toward atheism – literal believers becomes allegorical believers, allegorical believers becomes agnostics, and agnostics becomes atheists.
You know not whereof you speak.
@ Rob C.:
It isn’t the concern of science to make religion redundant. In as much as religions make non-evidential factual claims on the world, it is the concern of science to reject them.
What can make the social function of science redundant is other social functions. For example, if people realize that there isn’t any factual basis for religion, they may consider it a faux commitment and replace it with something productive, for example knitting.
People have the weirdest beliefs, and I think I have it figured out now, and no longer believe in evolution. Am I wrong? From now on, I believe in creation because it’s impossible.
Ah, I see. Thanks!
Is weing a test version of something like this?:
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/09/a_perfect_tool_for_the_jabs_contingent.php
No, I’m the real thing. I’ve come to the conclusion that knowledge belongs to science and belief to religion. We can learn about evolution, test it, modify it, and better understand how it works. I will not believe it because it is not impossible but verified by experiment. Creationism is not verifiable and from what I know, impossible, therefore it can be believed in. Is that logical?
Wazza asked me: I view religion as anything not evidence-based. What’s your definition?
To me, your definition of “religion” sounds more like a working description of “superstition” rather than religion.
Religion needs to be distinguished from superstition, belief, tradition, ritual, ceremony, habit, ethics, values, morals, world view, way of life, personal philosophy, discipline, and probably quite a few other notions.
Whatever “religion” is, it seems to provide “explanations” and incentives that support the social and cultural power structures from which it arises.
A dictionary I bought while in high school (Random House’s 1963 “American College Dictionary”) has a definition that has a different flavor from most of the definitions I have seen on-line. It reads:
I rather like those definitions but I would be satisfied if online discussions at least indicated whether the posters were addressing supernatural beliefs or social organizations.
Rob C.,
I didn’t mean to imply that your comments were off topic, only that they made the common mistake of using “religion” as a synonym for a belief in a supernatural entity. That mistake derails useful discussions about “adaptive values” of religion right from the get go.
There are plenty of arguments to be made about the adaptive values of “religion” but beliefs in supernatural explanations are not necessarily adaptive in and of themselves. Instead, “god” appears to be the consequence of “adaptive” characteristics working from ignorance, misinformation, fear, and genuine curiosity.
Being social creatures and political animals, humans aren’t likely to forgo the benefits of social groups, including the historically powerful religious groups.
And in the US, at least, I don’t expect religious institutions to be replaced by other types of associations or organizations any time soon. It would be nice, but I’m not betting on it.
$95 student registration?! Arg… this is gonna hurt.
I don’t see how religion, of any kind, can be divorced from superstition. If superstition isn’t involved, it’s just a social group. Every religion is a social group, but not every social group is a religion.
Wazza,
Buddhism does not require belief in the supernatural. Does that mean it is not a religion? No.
Most (if not all) of the modern Unitarian churches do not require any belief in the supernatural for membership in their religion or church. Does that take the belief system and organization outside any standard definition of religion? No.
Just because most religions have superstition and supernaturalism as core beliefs, does not mean that superstition is religion. Treating them as identical does not help to advance an argument or discussion.
You said “Every religion is a social group, but not every social group is a religion.”
No kidding. But the human tendency to form and act in groups contributes strongly to the establishment and durability of religious ones.
Dammit I’m very close, but $195 for me. I’m just a curious working guy. Throw us a bone over here. No one I know is gonna wanna come with me, not for the subject, even less for the price. Dammit.
It seems to me that religion, over the course of human history, has been a particularly effective tool for motivating groups of people to act in unison to accomplish achievements they could not do as individuals, for good AND ill. This is clearly adaptive on a societal level (of course you’d have to believe in group selection to accept this statement).
It also seems to me that the belief in the supernatural aspect of religion is likely not required for these beneficial effects and has been retained over the years as a neutral or even detrimental side-effect.
Cancer is probably at least in part a side-effect of the need for rapid cell proliferation, differentiation, and migration to, infiltration of and integration into distant sites in embryogenesis, including, at least in placental mammals, the need to infiltrate and invade foreign (maternal) tissues to form a placenta.
Natural selection probably acts strongly to promote and enhance these capabilities in embryos, but acts much more weakly to eliminate or modulate these same traits in cancers that most commonly affect adults after their reproductive years.
Also, cancerous traits may have little or no adaptive benefit for the organism, but for the individual cancer cell they most certainly do.
RobC #15: Religious societies seem to survive better than non-religious ones. I have little data to support that claim – but the relative historical paucity of secular societies points that way. It seems worth investigating, a nyway
It has been investigated, here is a study concerning those subjects, and the results are not what you expect.
http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html
A little taste: The positive correlation between pro-theistic factors and juvenile mortality is remarkable, especially regarding absolute belief, and even prayer (Figure 4). Life spans tend to decrease as rates of religiosity rise (Figure 5), especially as a function of absolute belief. Denmark is the only exception. Unlike questionable small-scale epidemiological studies by Harris et al. and Koenig and Larson, higher rates of religious affiliation, attendance, and prayer do not result in lower juvenile-adult mortality rates on a cross-national basis.<6>
If you don’t believe in karma and a soul that can be reborn, can you be a Buddhist?
I’ll talk about cancer later, I’m tired now — though most has already been said.
David Marjanović, OM asked:
My understanding is that it depends on what sort of Buddhism you subscribe to.
I am no expert, but based on my Buddhist friends and colleagues, all of whom were raised as Buddhists as children in atheist/magic-free families, it does not appear to be a requirement.
Notions of reincarnation preceded Buddhism and although fully compatible with Buddhism and part of the original understanding of traditional practitioners, it does not seem to be essential to all sects.
As it has been explained to me, in the more philosophical sects of Buddhism, the concept of “karma” relates to how we live our daily lives and might be paraphrased crudely as “what goes around comes around” or “live by the sword, die by the sword.”
When I last seriously looked at Buddhism in my undergrad years, the sects that appealed to me seemed to combine the best of my Karate training with the approach to values I saw in the Unitarian churches. But that was 30 ears ago and my memory or understanding could be totally screwed.
FWIW plenty of Buddhists believe superstitious nonsense. And I think there is a tendency for those in the west (including myself) to encounter forms of Buddhism that have been deliberately cleansed of any references to gods or supernaturalism.
Actually, I’m going to take PZ’s suggestion and try to attend the conference.
First observation: I hold Torjborn in high regard. If TL tells me the bulk of theoretical physicists are atheists, I’ll take him at his word. I think I recall that Michael Turner or someone else observed that a similar state of affairs existed within cosmology. However, IIRC, those are minorities within the communities of (respectively) astronomy and physics, yes? Not that it matters, because science isn’t a popularity contest, but my impression from reading Jastrow and Davies is that an increasing number of astronomers have moved toward agnosticism away from atheism, perhaps influenced by some sort of fine tuning argument.
Second comment: cancers could be seen as adaptive for the infectious agents that increasingly have been linked to the various kinds of cancer. Uncontrolled growth of dysfunctional cells could be seen as a rich growth medium no longer able to coordinate any sort of response against a predator or parasite.
Third comment: Why is it necessary within any scientific setting to ‘go after religion with teeth’? Isn’t it sufficient to show that the approach of religion can not yield any result recognizable to science? I mean, I’m pretty sure that Hugh Ross is going to get creamed if he attempts to argue from cosmic fine tuning to the Christian faith. I know that, and I’m a Christian. If, on the other hand, he argues that from his perspective the data available to us seems consonant with his personal faith, I don’t think he’s going to get creamed. He’s just not going to be effective at persuading anyone that his belief system should be privileged in any way. Just my two cents, people.
Scott Hatfield, OM,
I’ve been an all out atheist for most of my life but the believers I have known have all had rather diverse ideas about what “god” was and what sort of “proof” or “disproof” would satisfy or shake their beliefs.
For instance, when the soviet cosmonauts crowed that they saw no god in space, the believers I knew were bewildered as to whose god they thought they were looking for. And when panspermia was first proposed as a non-theistic alternative to god-directed creation of life, it posed no threats and entirely missed the point for the believers I knew.
I think many, if not most, of the atheists who frequent Pharyngula arrived at their atheism through science. And those who base their belief in god on some sort of half-baked twisting of science really need to have their brains re-fitted and their scientific illiteracy corrected. Those sorts of believers get both science and faith completely wrong.
But for those who do not base their religious beliefs on scientific reasoning, a scientific debunking isn’t going to prove anything except that the critic doesn’t understand their version of god.
Bold added:
Of course.