Hi Kenny
The point I am trying to make is that downmarket Evolutionists can be quite as "crazy" as downmarket Inteligent Designists. The "crazy" text book I referred to - I kept it because it was so bizarre - says that it is teaching "evolution." What I find most objectionable about evolutionary publicists, like Robyn Williams and company, is that that they compare the most advanced scientists dealing with the latest on genetics and evolution with some unhappy fundamentalist and declare themselves victims of a "war on Science." They conspicuously refuse to meet the arguments of anyone as qualified as themselves with a different point of view. I didn't invent my refugee friends - they were part of my childhood, and I have since learned that their aproach to evolution through catatrophic events, rather than through natural selection, has a lot going for it. Of course the advent of genetic science has modified many argument relating to evolution.

Seriously Sells, this is not up to your usual standard

You accuse your "fellow scientists" (although what they can possibly have in common with you is beyond me) of religion-bashing, because of...

"...the narrowness of their education and the seemingly inevitable reduction of everything to facts"

I wonder if you could possibly phrase for us a summation of your own approach, using the same thought process.

What, Sells, do you "reduce everything to"?

"...the seemingly inevitable reduction of everything to..."

What?

Fable? Emotion? Intangibles? Mystery? Power?

If - as I suspect you will - you protest that you wouldn't dream of such a mindless reductio, what, pray, gives you the right to accuse your colleagues in such a way?

Just because we cannot understand why you believe, not only in a God, but a very specific and unique specimen of that ilk, does not mean that we are unable to think broadly, and deeply, about the human condition.

We simply don't make that single, blind assumption that you do, that preconditions everything you say.

Here is an example of where you go wrong.

"All religions are different and they do not all spring from the one source of the need for an explanation of natural phenomenon"

Wrong. Twice.

All religions are essentially identical, in their reliance for their very survival on persuading people that something that does not exist, exists.

Nor does the attraction of religion stem from the need to make sense of our existence, but from a simple, perfectly understandable underlying yearning, that this existence is not "all there is".

Also, your logic is starting to creak badly.

"Are we not aware that the world’s seats of learning have their origin in the Church?"

That is a very dubious argument.

You suggest, presumably, that if the State were the only provider of education establishments, its teachings must necessarily be right?

As was so vividly demonstrated during the Cultural Revolution?

DonG, when george pell claims that "of course" prayer can cure cancer, when the MAJORITY of americans believe mary was a virgin, i don't think you can claim religious lunacy is restricted to a few "fundamentalists".

you talk about people "qualified with a different point of view", but what does that mean? i know the different ways one might be qualified to talk about evolution, but what makes someone qualified to talk about god? where is the evidence that ANY religious belief is not "downmarket"?

I was interested to watch a program about global warming on the abc hosted by Tony Jones i beleive. In which Robyn William's said that a particular scientist in America could not be trusted on global warming because he liked smoking ciggarettes and thought that breast implants were good. Now everybody say's silly things sometimes but what worried me was that no-one said anything .So i am not supprised by the silly comments heard on the ABC. I know it's a bit off the subject but has anyone out there worked out how rock paintings can be 30,000yrs old when dulux paints only garrante there paints for 20yrs and the mona lisa is in an air conditioned box in an air conditioned roam in an air conditioned building and been fixed up afew times and is only afew centuries old .please don,t say they have been restored over thousands of yrs because how then would you know how old they are . Alowly painter

Sells,

Science is all about the search for rational truth, i.e. truth supported by facts.

As religion is faith based, and has no facts other than a pyramid of discourse to support it, it is by its very nature the antithesis of science.

As long as religion deals with metaphysics such as the "afterlife" it has a place, but as soon as it clashes with science, such as with evolution, it must lose. Its rearguard action against the onslaught of scientific truth is the very reason that its adherents are losing faith.

have been restored over thousands of yrs because how then would you know how old they are .
dibbles,,
I have long wondered how do they actually gauge the age of a rock painting when both the canvas & the paint materials are millions of years old ?