Excellent piece
The internet has produced the instant expert, many people believing they can ague with experts armed only with a goggle search engine. You see it in the evolution and climate debates right now.

In the end it boils down to science is about facts and religion is about fantasy. Religious can't understand people with no faith and try to paint them as "believing stuff". While reality base people make the mistake of thinking that faith based people are capable of logical thought.

It must be greatly comforting to believe that you have no free will, and are just an automaton walking around according to coded programs in your dna. That you (but there is no "you" really is there?) have no responsibility for your actions, that your choice to study science and pursue knowledge and truth, in order to debunk religion, is simply the script that you are running on or some random pattern that arose by accident, and really you have no control over your destiny at all. Just a biological machine, a clockwork orange. I bet it makes sleeping at night really easy. I wish I was intelligent enough to be able to see and understand this truth that only genius scientists in their labs can comprehend, because then maybe i wouldn't feel so bad for that time i yelled at my parents, really my DNA made me do it...

Well done a clear example Donnie about what the Author is talking about, you read it but you didn't comprehend it.

Hi Kenny, well please enlighten me.

I am not a member of any religion and would claim to have a logical mind. I was raised [loosely] as Christian, but by the time I was 15 I was questioning and had rejected some of the basic tenets of Christianity. A search of my posts [not too many at this stage] would reveal that I am very critical of religious meddling in political, medical, sexual and so-called moral issues.

But, in the absence of any definite proof, one way or the other, I would say that having a religious belief is an act of faith and refusing to accept the possibility of what we could loosely term religious belief is also an act of faith.

Since I was a young child, I have had a wide variety of what could be called psychic experiences. During some of these experiences, I have learned about things of which I had no prior knowledge. This knowledge includes [but is not limited to] details of places I have never been to or heard about, how places I am familiar with looked many years before my birth and specific details of my ancestry. I have been able to verify the accuracy of this knowledge by investigation. I suppose we could call this the scientific approach. Those who are determined to deny the possibility of this kind of thing happening could say that I already knew about these things, but had forgotten that I knew. Please yourself, I'm not trying to convert anyone.

I lost my second wife coming up to four years ago. She had gone through a long distressing illness. Just after she died, her daughter [who so far as I know has no particular religious belief] told me that she wanted to be alone for a few minutes and "talk to mum". Within a few minutes, Sue told me she had a message for me. The "message" was a two-way private joke between Kathy and me. Sue said Kathy's opening bit, I responded like I always did and Sue finished the brief interchange with Kathy's words.

I have no wish to intrude in, and am not concerned by, the religious beliefs of others, with a few exceptions.
They are:
Number 1: I would like the courtesy recriprocated.
2: In this pluralist society, it is a divisive act for people to arrogate to their own religious beliefs the sole repository of morality. To cast the epithet that civilised society would collapse in the absence of their being there to provide the moral pillars of support. Those people are the ones who confuse and conflate the two completely separate issues of religious belief and morality.
3: It is deplorable, the religious immorality of on-going active campaigns to impose excessive and unwanted child bearing upon women in this world of 6.4 billion people, billions of whom are already desperate and unable to adequately foster their children.
4: But possibly the greatest concern of all is the attempt by a small minority of religious-minded to stifle the healthy curiosity of young people in their learning process: A minority with no knowledge of their place in the biological world, and no wish to learn. Gormless, unaware of humanity's niche in the web of life on this planet. Heedless of the similar emotions, the hopes, the fears, the communal obligations, the fundamental traits of good and bad that developed not only in ourselves, but also in our cousins the mammals from a common ancestry beyond a hundred million years ago. Oblivious to our shaky and all-too temporary perch on our ecological niche. Determined to negate the fostering, based on knowledge, of sensitivity in the culture of our society.
What hope humanity, should this narrow fundamentalist clique succeed in blinding society at this time of need for clear vision of its present parlous state. What hope, if it succeeds by carrying out the biblical edict of plucking out the eye that offends it so much?

Robin Holliday has to consider that science itself is developed on assumptions about the observable universe. It cannot therefore rule out or claim anything about what is not observable. I think many atheistic scientitists are blind to their own assumptions in this regard. They refuse to accept anything beyond what they are content to be able to measure.

While there are numerous facts you can discern about living things from observation you still cannot answer why matter arranged in a certain way exhibits "life" but in any other way does not. Arriving at a definition of exactly what "life" is - other than saying that if molecules are arranged in a certain way they should become "living" - requires more than just physical appraisal. Philosophical considerations like why living things exhibit a survival purpose only to later die need to be addressed. Life is far more than just a physical argument.

Crusader

I know a lot of scientists who view both sides of the debate objectively and with a degree of impartiality where possible.

Whilst science doesn’t provide all of the answers, it certainly provides an explanatory path based on factual evidence and a degree of tangibility as opposed to the belief in some archaic document and supposed spiritual superbeing concocted many centuries ago.

Humans have a basic flaw in that they can become feeble minded and need to believe in a higher power that they believe will get them through life. Fair enough, but at least be open minded enough to entertain the thought that there may be other alternatives in the life/existence debate.

Your statement "They refuse to accept anything beyond what they are content to be able to measure" is baseless. To alter that statement to "They refuse to accept anything beyond what they read in the bible" is more appropriate to the God squad. So many times I have debated with the kerb crawlers and to this day not one of them have forfeited that religious indoctrination is rife with hypocrisy and contradiction.

I guess that trying to impart scientific knowledge onto religious zealots so that they can at least become informed is fruitless, after all, its easier to believe in parables than yourself.

Robin its a good question but I disagree with your conclusion for the following reasons:

Firstly
Science doesnt prove anything it mearly fails to disprove. Your a scientist you know this. Its the underliying principle of a null hypothysis, and in turn of the scientific method.

Secondly
There are no truths in science. As Decarte said 'All that I know to be true is I think therefore I am.' To be anything but agnostic requires faith (faith in science as in your case), mystercism or devine revilation.

Thirdly
Quantum Mechanichs may explain free will maybe it doesnt, maybe another theory will, maybe it wont, I dont know and nor do you.

If you want to argue that religion defies logic, thats fine everybody knows its a matter of faith but nothing is to be gained by professing a monopoly on truth.

Maybe our point of difference is a linguistic one but its an important one.

You might like to see this piece by Rodney Stark on the basis of reason science and capitalism:

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=tqm4xd5mqkk5px43d968m19qmf4w3g5y

These post just confirm what the Author is talking about. It also affirms the idea that those of faith find it impossible to understand those without. Science is the tool we used to shed light into dark corners, nothing will escape it's searching light. Some complex mechanisms may allude it for another one hundred or one thousand or more years, but science will eventually uncover it. To say that science does not seek and uncover the truth is silly. Are you suggesting that electrons don't carry a negative charge or that energy and mass are interchangeable? Are you saying that quantum tunneling doesn't happen these things were discovered and understood by using science. Science is above individuals because science is testable disprovable. individuals may believe in a theory but id it's not based in fact if it's not testable, the results not repeatable then the idea doesn't last. Religion says there is untestable supernatural and science says there isn't. I think in the end it comes down to people a faith need a reality that doesn’t exist so they invent one.

Robin Holliday seems to be of the 'Just trust me, I'm smarter than you school'.

Perhaps I should say that because Robin does not have a PhD in philosophy, he is too ignorant to understand that he is speaking irrational nonsense? Does anything think that my statement is valid? I hope not. Yet, I have done exactly the same as Robin has, simply appealed to my own authority.

The intellectual egotistical snobbery of Doc Holliday is truly something to behold.

Amusingly enough, at the end of his 'it's too complex for anyone who disagrees with it' argument, he admits that some people who do understand it disagree with him.

I have a lot more comments here http://alangrey.blogspot.com/2005/12/intellectual-snobbery-in-evolution.html

Robin Holliday wrote: "Yet no wheels or propellers exist in the animal kingdom. The Darwinian explanation for this is perfect: it is impossible to evolve a wheel by stages, because only a whole wheel has function."
But wheels and propellers do exist. The bacterial flagellum consists of a rotary motor driving a propeller.

Excellent article Robin! The god/gods of the gaps will continue, because people don't bother to inform themselves about what is already known, just perhaps not to them.

I tolerate their believing whatever they want, to help them cope with life, reduce anxiety etc. What I don't accept is their intolerance of others and their trying to force their agenda and claimed morality onto me, especially through Govt laws. That smacks of religious tyranny!

We need freedom of religion, but we also need freedom from religion.

Haxley,
yes, a randy little Rotifer a-revving through the water, snuffling through its food supply just hundred micron size - it shares with us a common ancestor. Now that would cause surprise
to the intelligent designers who would close our prying eyes.

The other mistake that Faith based people make is that some the idea of whether there is a god or not is anymore a rational area of debate then if the Easter bunny exist of if there is fairies at the bottom of your garden. To an atheist they all don’t exist for the same reason on proof. An agnostic is not laying a each way bet they generally “believe” in the super natural they just don’t believe in any particular fantasy. Religious truly scare me because not only do they believe in something that they can’t see, cant touch and can’t hear they actually try to convince other people that they flights of fantasy are real. The only difference between a cult, a sect and the “true path” is the number of devotees. Why should we take Christians, Jews, Muslims or Buddhist any more seriously they say the Raelians or other New age stuff. As your religious text become less and less relevant to all but the most devote (let’s faces it great swaths of the bible are simply ignored even by the church) something less dogmatic and more adaptable needs to take it’s place.

All this blather is unnecessary. It involves taking the theists seriously, simply because of historical precedence in enculturation. The priorities should be reversed, with the religiously inclined obliged to prove their assumptions. Of course they can't: they believe because they have been brought up to believe, and they function in societies where indications of belief are virtually demanded. It always baffles me that otherwise apparently intelligent individuals blindly spend their lives within a little cocoon of inherited notions which they have been assured represent central truth. Next door, in other cultures. other intelligent individuals are following the same course, but with radically different religious notions and rites, also represented as absolute truth.
Since the emergence of mankind an astonishing panoply of gods, demons, spirits, and the like have been invented, out of ignorance and fear (and hope), to "explain" the world and offer "salvation". There has never been any lack of prophets to do the inventing and provide back-up tales "sanctifying" the spirits. But why do we, in a scientific age when we understand a great deal about the universe, and have appropriate investigative techniques, go on giving any credence to this antique hogwash? We should no longer dignify it by pretending to discuss it, so reversing the demands of reason. Religions are conceptual systems built on what is inherently irrational, propped up by social habituation. Why is that hard to see?

Robin,
I loved your last line:
"Finally, it is often pointed out that religious scientists exist. It seems that these are individuals who can in some way compartmentalise contradictory viewpoints, but this is an ability that I for one find extremely hard to understand."

Guess why it is extremely hard for you to understand.
Take a wild stab in the dark. Throw a dart at the wall.
They don't exist that's why.
Scientific evidence proves they don't exist. The religious don't believe in science. So you are not a scientist. Don't worry about it. Be a priest.

What a great world it would we if just one or indeed all of the Gods man has followed could be proved to be true.
How good if our personal God was the one.
How much better however if we could understand we have no need of a fantasy fairy storey.
And that fighting and killing in the name of a God is insane.
My fall from Christianity came after it was made clear the collection tray had more meaning than I, that hunger would e rewarded in heaven if I gave till it hurt, no thanks.

What always makes me laugh is the argument by religiously inclined folk that "If you don't believe in God, then there's no absolute right or wrong so you might as well just do what you like"

To which I reply, "If you are incapable of telling what is right and wrong from considering your actions and understanding their effect on you and others without some guidance from the big ole guy in the sky, it's you who has the problem, not me"

But of course they never understand..

Free will, a sense of right and wrong or good and bad, and the idea that there are consequences for actions and responsibility for them are common ideas to all religions that i know of. And this does not just mean theistic religions with God given commandments and judgement. For example, Buddhism has the concept of karma which is not believed to be a law imposed by some big guy in the sky.

I disagree with the author that this is the fundamental difference between religion and science. It is true that modern science often takes the emergent stance to the mind-body problem, ie that the mind is epiphenomenal and arises from the physical events in the body (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-body_problem), but the mind-body problem is still a philosophical debate that has not been conclusively settled by science and to push the materialist theory authoritatively and then say the scientific evidence is too complex for the common man to understand is exactly what the major religions of the past are guilty of when they say it is God's will and He is too great for you to understand so you must just believe and obey. It is actually anti-science to do this. Science is about uncovering the truth, whatever that may be, not enforcing the dominant theories of the time onto the ignorant or onto the politically correct and "religious" scientists who manage to maintain a tolerance and openness for alternative viewpoints.

The quality Robin Holliday’s article is very disappointing. Its physical construction is careless and the arguments are so sloppily constructed and full of arrogance that he gives the theists the equivalent of an over's worth of long hops outside off-stump. His butchery of the free will issue is especially facile. While Alan Grey's response is full of the usual inanities, Robin makes it far too easy for him to get on his soapbox. As with Richard Dawkins, Holliday's apparent personal affront at the stubbornness of the rest of humanity in continuing to believe in supernatural explanations gets in the way of simply stating a reasoned and principled view of the problem.

As I think OldPro said above, it is the theists who propound the theory which has no evidential backing from several centuries of systematic investigation of the natural world. The burden of proof is on the theists to adduce evidence to support their theory.

However, regardless of its explanatory poverty and lack of evidential backing, religion is virtually ubiquitous among us humans. We are apparently compelled genetically to seek AND find causes and explanations. It is unfortunately true a fearful amount of education and above average intelligence to absorb sufficient of the available evidence and to stay with the analysis thereof until some dim comprehension dawns as to the astonishing ability of the natural world to generate, without supernatural intervention, the array of life we see around us and the subjective experience that we live. Lacking either of these blessings, it is almost inevitable that we duck sideways and throw the question into the divine Too-Hard Basket.

For the foreseeable future therefore, science and religion will co-exist in developed societies. It is unlikely that the defensively religious will be happy with this coexistence. It therefore rests on the science crew persistently to make their case in the most humane language possible and to insist that, to get equal time on matters pertaining to the natural world, participants must meet standards of evidence, procedural quality and explanatory power as rigorous as those that science seeks to impose on its practitioners.

Many here have merely listening to novices when it comes to understanding divinity. The divinity of the last century was "Science" supposedly had all the answers. But what's the scientific explosion done to the natural environment? What has science done to better human relationships? Science isn't more than analysis of chemical results. It doesn't answer the ultimate questions of why.

Holliday assumes the religious have, "a belief that the material human body is separable from a non-material soul". This is nonsense as the person is the soul, not has a soul. The body is the vehicle by which the person operates in the world and is not the totalitary of the person. The person is not what lies in the grave, but what the person is and what he/she has done in life that has caused change and influence on others. The "person" is the evidence of having lived that remains when the molecular structure of their body is nothing more than dust. We merely borrow from other life forms to fulfil our life on this planet, but we are other than the protein structures that we have absorbed. The ideas that Holliday have posted here is intrinsically him more than any cells that yesterday were part of his body that he exhaled or excreated.

When it comes to defining religion he believes all hold to, "a belief that humans have free will, a conscience, and the God-given ability to choose between good and evil". What is he stating here? Does science deny all these abilities of humanity? That they do not really exist? One wonders how he can willfully dismiss this conclusion held by the religious by using his choice to imagine science and religion are diametrically opposed? Does he have a will to free choice to make such a statement or has he been preprogrammed by his genetic forebears to hold such a conclusion?

It's important if one is to deny a total belief system that he properly evaluates and fuilly understands all tenents of his denoncement. Obviously he is merely stating his meagre opinion and belief

In the article under consideration, the author states that religions are based upon untruths. I assume that the author has made a lifelong study of religion and the relationship between matter and spirit to be able to make such a statement. I think not and therefore to make such a presumptuous statement is to be “not intellectually rigorous” The author is an expert in his field of evolutionary biology only and that frankly does not qualify him to talk with such authority about religion. To do so without studying the relationship between matter and spirit is to do what he accuses religious people of at the start of the article and that is to lack understanding of a field of knowledge.

The author states that DNA is a “polymeric chemical, with enormous coding capacity”. This is obviously true, but who wrote the code? Bill gates does not employ random number generators to write programs/code and neither does God. The simple fact of the matter is that the probability of obtaining DNA by random chance occurrence is 10-40,000. The odds are so astronomically small that Cosmologist Fred Hoyle is on record as having said “there is more chance of a tornado blowing through a junk yard and assembling a flight ready Boeing 747 than there is of DNA having formed by random chance mechanism. He further said that even if the whole universe (~10 to he power 80 fundamental particles) were primordial soup, that DNA could not have formed in the short 10 to the power16 seconds since creation.

It is also important to note that natural selection could not act before the first cell and that the by chance mechanism for the formation of the DNA molecule has been dropped by most serious scientists as long ago as the 1980s. The father of Chemical evolution Dean Kenyon has of course repudiated his life’s work in this area as he could not explain how cells could form without DNA. He could not answer the question as to where the code came from, neither can any body else.

A good source of information on this subject, compiled by phd scientists,
is www.answersingenesis.com.au

Better sites for information on this subject by people with phds are http://www.noanswersingenesis.com.au or http://www.talkorigins.com. You will find facts not fantasies

It is all very well to say that there is a great gap in knowledge of modern molecular biology etc. between the religious and scientists but honestly how many scientists have actually studied the bible? I know I haven't - I have tried but gave up a few pages into Genesis because it doesn't tie in with my views. Most of us are guilty of ignorance one way or another. Presumably those who both believe and are scientists - they definitely do exist - know something the rest of us don't. Maybe we should ask them rather than assume they are some sort of anomoly. That would be the scientific approach.

Whether free will exists or not is hardly a useful topic for public/political debate. While it is interesting philosophically - the practical reality is that we do need to lock up those who commit crimes. This requirement exists whether or not they made the decision "freely".

Whether the process of thinking is classical (in the Newtonian/deterministic sense), random (per Quantum Mechanics), or based on mathematical "fuzzy logic" the end result is the same. We take some inputs, we consider them for a while, and we come to a conclusion. We expect to be judged on that conclusion.

To all intents and purposes we do have a free will. The little statement on this issue significantly detracts from article in my view. There seemed no purpose for it.

Examining the main point now... It is possible, I believe, to argue against a point of view while being tolerant at the same time.

So yes. Of course we should be tolerant. As long as those who believe in religion do not unreasonably impinge on my freedoms (and the majority do not), I have no wish or intention to impinge on theirs.

I think the bit on free will is a red herring.
Why is it that those of a religion believe in free will because it came from God?(as suggested). There are many sects of Christians who deny free will, or at least have a diminished view of freedom(based, e.g., on issues of election and sovereignty). Like wise there are many non-theistic philosophers who argue for strong (libertarian) free will, even in the face of arguments from illusion.
Lastly, there is brand of thinker (called the compatibilist) who thinks that free will is consistent with a determined universe.
It is one thing to assert the alleged clash between science and religion, (to what success has to be determined), but to suggest that science and free will are opposites needs a lot more thinking about.

Christians have not come to terms with alot of their ideas. Free will competes with predestination.