misterbear:


The third and fourth points are correct: It is Christians that tend to be opposed to stem cell research and abortion. Those things do not contravene Islamic doctrine.

As for the other points: being against equality in marriage and imposing your beliefs on others; other religions particularly Islam are guilty of that as well. In fact, Islamic culture is guilty of these things in some ways even more than Christian culture is (especially in the west). Nevertheless, as a man of science, it is to be expected that Dawkins would be particularly focused on those areas where science is threatened especially in his own part of the world. (Note that Muslims also tend to be opposed to evolution.)

cloudgoddess:
discovered a massive amount of evidence to the contrary.

And for that reason, creation really can't even be considered a theory as you put it, at least not in the scientific sense. There is no collection of peer-reviewed evidence supporting the christian creation idea, which is the only way something can go from a hypothesis to a theory in science.

2. Please view my earlier post on why Christian thought specifically is attacked the most.

GeneralShepherd:


Do you actually think that every experiment can be recreated in the lab?

The sun is just a tiny fraction of the energy that was released from the big bang, and now you are asking scientists to recreate the big bang just that you may believe.

Science does not wish to make anyone belive in anything, infact you are encouraged to challenge the big bang theory that is how science grows. However, you can not just challenge the big bang theory based on what is written in the bible.

Read other scientific works, study the theory and dismantle it's merits. If your argument is validitated through a peer-review process, You will gain instant global recognition as the man that stated the improbability of the big bang theory.

CoolUsername:


But the Muslim influence in the American government is very limited. So they don't really need to be criticized.


Imagine a country, where some evangelical universities take dinosaur fossils and date them to 4,000 years ago. That's the kind of thing that would piss Richard Dawkins off.

KingEbukasBlog:


There are old earth creationists , theistic evolutionists , progressive creationists and there are young earth creationists . Cold , aint you the one that claimed that atheists know about our Religion even more than we do Looks like you told a blatant lie cos every damn time I see none sense I can't even care to respond to

UyiIredia:


People always talk of peer-review as if it guarantees that a hypothesis is right which is false. Peer review has good intent but drive for profits, bias, laziness etc skews the process badly. Only a naïve person doesn't see this. These are factors that bedevil peer review process in any field of science.

UyiIredia:


@ bold: The fact that you write this shows that you are ignorant of the young-earth creationism. Like most other skeptic and atheists you've not sat town to read and listen to the arguments and evidence creationist have to see whether it is worthy. Creationists in fact have loads of peer reviewed articles. In fact, initially they tried getting their articles through to secular journals but their bias against anything Biblical which they deemed anti-science stopped editors from publishing their ideas for critique.

GeneralShepherd:




So what do you suggest we replace peer-review process with? Self-review? No system is perfect

cloudgoddess:

Where are they?

I have seen several articles claiming to be evidence for YEC, only to find that they were already disproven by actual scientists. The bias against biblical findings doesn't exist - but a bias against falsehoods does. Extraordinary claims, like YEC, require extraordinary evidence, which we have yet to have found. And on top of that, there is so much evidence against a young earth that it's not even a matter of dispute in the scientific community anymore, and hasn't been for hundreds of years (specifically since the 1700s, when Scottish geologists concluded the earth's age must be "inconcievably old" due to observing the strata in canyons and fossil sites).

Another reason YEC "scientists" aren't taken seriously is likely because they try to do science backwards. They come with a claim that they "know" is true because of their religious indoctrination, then they look for evidence trying to prove what they already believe is true - causing them to ignore evidence that competes with their view (which happens to be very plentiful). This isn't how good science is done.

Science is supposed to go from:
Unbiased observation --> Hypothesis --> Test (and retest, and retest) --> Peer review --> Supported Theory (Fact).

It seems that YEC "science" is more like:
Hypothesis ("Abrahamic god created everything" ) --> Biased observation ("Look at nature, it proves there is a creator" ) --> Fact ("Young earth creationism is true." )

UyiIredia:


If science was all about unbiased observations then the thousand of fossils of specimens no different from their living counterparts should have made nonsense of the idea of common descent. Not to.mention the total inanity of the mechanisms. You can go to creationists sites like creation.com or icr.org and actually read their arguments for yourself and critique it. You'll see that it fits. Observations are made into facts within the framework of a theoretical view. This applies to both creationists and evolutionists.

Tellemall:


If it's not a belief, why do you believe it? You stake out your faith on it, don't you? You would shake your head at another who couldn't grasp it, or smile at their inability to believe it or perhaps even descend on them

At the end of the day, anything people believe in is an illusion. According to atheists. Therefore the belief that there is no God is an illusion itself.

cloudgoddess:

If it's not a belief, why do you believe it?
Because there is evidence, as I just summarized for you if you actually read it. Reliable and repeatedly confirmed evidence is the only way us humans can ever confidently "know" anything (without just lying to ourselves). If evidence was released that proved that the universe was standing still, that planets and galaxies didn't collide, that there is no cosmic radiation, then as a reasonable person I'd obviously be forced to change my mind about the validity of the big bang theory. But creationism still wouldn't necessarily follow from that, all I would know at that point was that the big bang isn't true.

You stake out your faith on it, don't you?
What do you mean by this?

At the end of the day, anything people believe in is an illusion. According to atheists. Therefore the belief that there is no God is an illusion itself.
Belief there is no god is a lack of belief because of lack of evidence. People who insist that their god exists are the ones making the positive claim, which THEY need to defend. There have been over 4,000 gods proposed throughout human history. How can I know yours is real and the other 3,999 aren't, without any reliable evidence? The default position is that NONE of them exist, until at least one of them is proven. Show the solid evidence for god, and then we can talk.

Yes, everything anyone believes is an illusion in a way, because human thought is abstract. A thought about something isn't that thing itself. But that doesn't mean that we can't use our abstract senses to identify consistencies in reality. That's what science is all about.

analice107:

There's evidence for the big bang theory? Plse show me.