So a social movement somehow doesn’t equal a point of view? Seriously? What the fuck do you think social movements are?

I am not going to actually wait for a response, because the response is simple. Cultural movements are collective, loosely connected, individual points of view. Like I said, they are the practical application of philosophical schools of thought. Schools of thought that are also collective, loosely connected, individual points of view. The only significant difference, is that cultural movements tend to wander even further afield than philosophical schools of thought, because they are adopted by far more people.

And unsurprisingly, you ignore the argument that skepticism as a philosophical view doesn’t imply atheism. The running thread through the philos of skepticism is rejection of dogmatism, not a rejection of belief in itself.

Of course that is completely irrelevant to any discussion about the topic that originated this whole debacle. Arguing that that situation was about a philosophical position, rather than a cultural position would be rather absurd.

RJL –

“What was there before?”

This assumes that there was a “before,” for something to be. I think it is a rather large stretch to assume that our understanding of time is particularly accurate. I mean it is a rather useful abstraction for describing our movement through space, but that doesn’t mean it is particularly useful for describing the universe.

That aside, given the number of theories about what was before, will be after, exists concurrently, there is no reason to assume a supreme being of any sort. I mean even if you want to assume something capable of actions humans might attribute to “god,” is there really any reason to assume that such a something is not merely a life form rather more advanced than we? Assuming that something from “before” produced the big bang, why wouldn’t we just as easily assume that it was a life form fucking around in a lab – possibly with a particle accelerator (see Gregory Benford’s COSM). Ultimately it is just as likely that there is a physicist somewhere “outside,” running around with our universe, trying to prevent it’s government from destroying it, as it is that some god made it happen.

To me it even seems slightly more likely, though admittedly that is only because I think that would totally fucking rock.

Which we do, of course, but not as much as we did if, say, every time a concept came out of fiction we assumed it could be true unless we could prove it wrong. We would then have a very long list of things that we knew could be true because they were thought of but that cold not be disproved because their existence does not require a tangible physical reality according to the belief itself.

And in the end, that ends up being the case with god much of the time. But not all of the time. And, in the case of the present conversation, not at all. Not even a little.

The “god” that is believed in by many mainstream 18th and 19th century Christians and by fundamentalists today has specific physical properties with specific testable implications. This has been stated in the literature zillions of times and we are starting to approach it being stated on this thread far more times that I would have thought necessary.

If you want to define god as a thing that has physical properties that can be observe and tested until the tests show that those properties are better explained by something else, then you have done a very good job of defining philosophical snake oil. But that is not what we are talking about here.

Bullpuckey. Substitute “great green Arkleseizure” for “god” and see how it sounds. Jeez, one would think with this amount of cowardly special pleading you’d do better than this weak-sauce fake agnosticism.

Simply not true. Do you understand how probability works? I could offer a thousand evidences for gravity and once every single one of those has been disproven it makes not one jot of difference to the likelihood that gravity exists. The same goes for Strings, unicorns and v = ma

(Mary McCaslin)

“We don’t know for certain.” Oh, really?! (Pardon the sarcasm.)

I’m not saying that “I don’t know = God.” I’m saying that “I don’t know = 50/50 god or no-god.” Anything beyond that — either way — is faith.

It sounds to me as though your argument is with religion.

What if it was the second most important piece of evidence, or the third? Would that invalidate that it was proffered as evidence and disproven? Also, the fact that it was a major piece of the evidence for god in the 18th and 19the Century western world and remains today key in the ID debate, is not insignificant.

God is one of those things … it is defined as something that one can never really disprove. But, when evidence is proffered, and every single time it is disproved, the existence of god starts to become less and less likely.

On your second point, evolutionary biology certainly does deal with the origin of life.

How did I know? I clicked on your name! Yeah, we’ll get a beer some time in the middle. Which I’m guessing could be, for instance, the CC Club.