Here's the thing about worshiping science...you become dumber for it

American Irony ^ | 8-27-15 | The Looking Spoon

[The Looking Spoon]

One time while listening to a radio show a Christian scientist who was being interviewed was asked how he answers those who believe you can't have faith in God or be religious AND be a scientist. His answer to that is about as good as it can ever get.

He says he tells those people that "science is understanding God's handiwork." I agree with that 1,000,000%. If God created everything, then it's only logical He created the processes by which everything works. In other words, He created science.

The notion propagated by atheists that you can only choose one, or that religion and science contradict each other is as convenient and childish as it is totally false.

I say all of that as a backdrop for the latest musings from a scientist who is atheist who says...Anything that goes into a black hole is really entering another universe. This is true for three reasons:

1. Science
2. Because Stephen Hawking said so.
3. Science some more...

Look, I know there's like, A LOT, I don't know about astrophysics, and by a lot I mean pretty much everything. Half the time I look up in the sky I confuse planes for shooting stars...sometimes when I do that it's actually night time.

I get it that there is a lot of education and application of it going on in Stephen Hawking's noggin. So I'm not opposed to him spouting speculation out of his highly educated ass.

What I can't stand are people who think scientific speculative theory is fact that can't be questioned by even the slightest skepticism unless you're some troglodyte who spends every waking minute hoping that the power grid goes Galt on the planet and sends us all back to the stone age.

Take this exchange I found between three readers in the comments section, the commenters are delineated by my additions in bold...

Thoughtful comment: I love how science goes back and forth - on and on about this issue and the public does not question it. Science has fallen to pride - they can prove little - speculate much and denigrate alternative views sounds like people seeking grants and media attention.

Bozo response 1: Oh man this is the funniest comment I have read in a long long time. Next time you are in hospital take a look at the science all around you.

Bozo response 2: Science is the reason you're able to post your inane comments> Let me guess - you're into religion?

Translation: Daydreams about celestial entities that are so far away it would take thousands of years of traveling at the speed of light to reach them is "science" on the same level as a defibrillator and an iPhone? To science worshipers denial that black holes are actually a one-way portal to alternate universes is to deny all of modern technology?

This coming from people who think they're going to save the planet from religion with their faux-atheistic intelligence. They have their heads stuck so far up inside a (very smelly) universe that can only be entered through their own personal black hole they don't realize that "science" has effectively become their deity. The resulting conduct is just as irrational, if not more so, than the religious types they level criticism against for having the very same faith in God that they hold in science.

The would say the difference is God is make-believe...as opposed to a black hole being a door to another universe. That's real.

I realize that two comments on one internet article do not a generalization make. That's the beauty of the internet, it stores all sorts of science is my religion/religion is crap memes. The two bozos blockquoted above aren't the exception, they are the result of an education with such memes.

Fortunately there were also many comments by people who did have a brain in their skull:

Medical science is real science. Theory and concepts unconnected to empirical evidence or facts is just fantasy. Can anybody show any empirical evidence that other universes exit? If not, then it is just a mathematical fantasy, not science.

So, thankfully, there's that, still...for now.

[Terry L Smith]

I don’t worship science, but it is nice to have an explanation, to the following questions, instead of ‘because’:

‘How d’at be d’at, and how d’at git to be d’at?’
‘How d’at happen?’
‘Wha’ I do tuh make d’at happen, and kin I do d’at again?’
‘How d’em t’ings git togethuh, and move like d’at, widdout sumptin’ stoppin’ d’at from goin’?’
‘Wha’ make d’em stars be?’
‘How birds know to git before it gits cold, and to come back when it gots warm?’
‘How can a piece o’ glass in a tube make a star bigger?’
‘How d’ey take sand from duh beach, and make glass?’

Lastly, in terms of gastronomics ...
‘How ma-yo-naisse don’ come apart?’
‘How come bacon smells, and tastes, so good?’

[The Looking Spoon]

That was great! If you have time to post the other parts I’d be happy to see them.

[Shark24]

Here ya go. Again, from the 1959 Catholic Fact book, “The Origin of Man” I find the author both rational and poetic:

The author quotes astronomer Pierre Rousseau to illustrate the materialistic point of view: “One must be the victim of incurable anthropocentrism to believe that the slightest importance attaches to the race of thinking microbes inhabiting an imperceptible globe revolving round this sun”

He answers this view as follows: “Theology in her turn will reply: One must be the victim of an excessive concern for quantity to disregard so completely the supreme importance of quality. Granted that man is no more than a “thinking microbe”, a circumstance which confers upon him not equality to, but superiority over, the entire material universe, whatever size it may be. In fact, a false problem is created by the attempt to discredit thought on account of the small space occupied in the universe by the material organism which is its vehicle……..

Indeed, it we imagine an astronomer at the eye-piece of the giant Mount Palomar telescope, it might well be asked whether the greater marvel is to be found at the eye-piece or the aperture end of the telescope.

Our contention is that it will be found at the eye-piece end. The “thinking microbe” who stands at an instrument which is the product of a wealth of scientific research and technique and of a vast expenditure of capital and human labour, the astronomer whose enormously extended range of vision plumbs the furthest reaches of space, is to our eyes a more astonishing spectacle than the huge agglomerations of atoms making up the nebulae, each one of which is but a replica of the others. We know but little about these nebulae. In particular, we do not know whether each galaxy trails, like our own sun, at least one planet inhabited by beings akin to ourselves. In this field any supposition is permissible and none is contradicted by theology. But the enormous extent of the space occupied by the stars, and the terrifying distances at which they are situated, are powerless to induce us to abandon our conviction that divine grace is superior to human nature, and that human nature with its endowment of intelligence and freedom is superior to mere matter.

In short, none of all this presents any problem. We are impressed neither by “astronomical” figures nor by the thousands of millions of years of the life of the universe compared to the few hundreds of thousands of the life of mankind. The appearance of man was a greater event than anything that has since happened on earth; and in the vast setting of the universe, the appearance of a man on the earth was a novelty surpassing all the aggregations of atoms whirling in the midst of the distant galaxies”

Cheers!