kekait said:
I think this thread is starting to go off-topic but, I will respond to your viewpoints. I agree that your religions ous views (or lack thereof) have nothing to do with your understanding of the sciences. You can probably tell that from my original post that I too don't have a full understanding of what it means to be a physics major but, there is a difference between what atheist and theist claim to be the absolute truth. We are still fighting for evolution to be taught in school in some parts of the U. S. I would like for you to provide an example of an atheist using "shoddy" science to manipulate their worldview.
I'm fully aware that my experiences might not be representative.
But anyway, I get the feeling that many atheists try to idolize science and mathematics, while it in fact is prone to many mistakes. For example, an atheist might bring up experiments by Miller and Urey to say "See, we don't need a God to explain the origin of life." While in fact they don't mention (and probably don't even know), that Miller-Urey is extremely far away from explaing an origin of life, so I find making the connection dishonest. Many atheists have significant troubles with saying "science doesn't know" or that a certain scientific theory is wrong".
For example, I once discussed with an atheist who had so many wrong thoughts about science. For example, he thought that physicists were able to derive new laws analytically and never made guesses of any kind. Anybody with a bit of experience in science will know the converse is true. For example, the Schrodinger equation is (as far as I know) a complete lucky guess which turned out to be compatible with experiments. He also said that if a theory is incompatible with experiments, then the math is wrong and the scientists are dumb. This is of course very silly. A theory might be mathematically very sound, but it might just happen not to agree with experiment. Failed theories are abundant in science. The fact that a scientific theory can turn out to be wrong (= not to describe the real world), was very unsettling to him for some reason.
Finally, I have met several people claiming " 1 = 1 thus the big bang happened". And those people really do mean what they said. Never even mind that they completely misunderstand what the big bang theory says.
Obviously, I'm not saying all atheists are idiots. But some are severely uneducated about the practice of science. The danger is however that they think they do know all this stuff and they are so certain of their own understanding. So for me, atheists are not better or more rational than theists. Some people of either groups are very bright, others have a shoddy understanding and think they know more than they do.
