Constance said;
Catholicism is not a political organisation

Well not now as such but it was very much so then, eg the Holy Roman Empire.
The Pope made war and destroyed kings etc.

The further away from Rome the stronger the protestants.

Henry VIII had dallied with Protestant ideas, but ultimately he proved to be conservative on matters of religious doctrine. It would take his son, Edward VI, and his advisors, to turn England into something more like a genuine Protestant country."

The High Church in Anglicanism bases many of its beliefs and practices on the foundation of Henry VIII retention of Catholic ways.

See: http://www.britannia.com/history/articles/relpolh8.html

Craig, re abductive reasoning, isn't the invention of a god to explain all this less economical than blaming a singularity? Hitchens, Dawkins, Krauss cho(o)se the most likely inference, while others choose faith.

It's what people do with their faith that HDK rail(ed) against, especially re modern-day Islam.

Craig Minns,

I don’t see how theists using inductive reasoning to justify their beliefs is any reason to not discuss with them arguments that use deductive reasoning. Some may never have considered arguments that use deductive reasoning. More to the point, theists rarely (if ever) arrive at their beliefs through any sort of reasoning. It’s usually taken on faith entirely and as the result of childhood indoctrination or an emotional need later on in life. The inductive reasoning they give to justify their beliefs later on are arguments they put forth to support a belief they already have and only find convincing because the belief came first. No-one, for example, hears the Kalam Cosmological Argument and then decides that God must exist. So I think your criticism of Dawkins and Hitchens, here, is confused.

<<They suggest that the religious experience must be inherently solipsistic (self-referential) and is therefore an entirely personal exercise which should have no place in the doings of the world, but then contradict themselves by trying to make people accept their view that their brand of atheism (which is also an entirely personal exercise) has some preeminent right to be heard.>>

You are talking about two different things here. Whether or not something has a “place in the doings of the world”, and a group’s right to be heard are two different things. Atheism isn’t a personal exercise either, it’s a response to a claim.

<<The question of the existence of God is ... unanswerable at the moment: as you say, it cannot be conclusively proven inductively and it's not amenable to deductive approaches.>>

I don’t see how it’s not amenable to deductive approaches. There are varying degrees of certainty that can be achieved, and attaining them can still be useful. Proving something conclusively, or reaching absolute certainty about something, is not necessary. In fact it’s useless, and introducing the notion of absolute certainty or conclusive proof is a red herring.

Continued…

…Continued

<<Scientists have faith too; the scientific method is to accept an hypothesis that seems to work until it is shown to be wrong by experiement.>>

That depends on what you mean by “faith.” Faith can be a religious belief without evidence, or it can be the complete confidence in something/someone. You are conflating these two; presumably to make Dawkins and Hitchens sound ignorant. It’s been years since I’ve read any of their books on religion, but from what I can remember, you have portrayed their positions as caricatures of what they really are. Usually, they only ever speak/spoke of a lack of evidence and the importance of evidence. Neither of them is/was stupid enough to transfer the burden of proof to themselves, or commit the Argument from Ignorance fallacy, by claiming dogmatically that this definitely means that a god mustn’t exist. So I have no idea of what you’re referring to when you claim that their “brand of atheism” is closer to religion than they’d like to admit.

<<There are about 10 mutually incompatible explanations for quantum behaviour and no definitive experiment in sight. Should we do as Dawkins and the charming "Hitch" do with religion and pretend that this means QM is nonsense?>>

I’m not aware of either one of them having said anything that could lead you to think that this is a conclusion they would reach. This is usually the type of caracaturisation that non-believers make when they either haven’t read their books, or something about them just got up their nose and they’re not sure what it was.

This is another example of the caracaturisation I’m talking about…

<<We "know what we know" but we think that means we also know what we don't know and that's a serious category error.>>

This alludes to a similar error in reasoning that “agnostics” always make in assuming that the question of the existence of a god somehow requires a higher level of certainty than other questions in life. And what would give you the impression that theists might know something that the rest of us don’t?

Luciferase, HDK take the null hypothesis to be that no God exists. In doing so they limit their possible explanations of the observations that religious people ascribe to a divine origin in an unscientific way. They may be right, but they may not: their approach requires a standard of evidence that is higher than that demanded of other hypotheses that are regarded as impeccably scientific.

AJP, I'm not suggesting there is any reason not to engage deductively other than the fact that it is always going to be unproductive. Using a light microscope to explore QM is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you have a deterministic (deductive) mindset, but it won't help you to understand why electrons don't behave like molecules.

The "scientific" approach that HDK use is based on a certain view of probability (that of Bayes) which has proven just as useless in understanding QM as a deterministic model and I suggest it is similarly useless in coming to grips with the religious experience.

In speaking of a lack of evidence, what is being said is simply: "I don't believe your account unless you can show me something I can explain based on what I already know". I have expalined why that is essentially a poor approach and is not one that Krauss, for example would take in his work in physics.

My point on QM was analogy, not literalism. Your response, however, is a good demonstration of why trying to explain religious experience to those who are determined to be unconvinced is always doomed to failure. I had hoped to have a discussion, not a debate.

What would give you the idea that theists don't know something that you don't?